Marshall McLuhan: News

Marshall McLuhan was Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a communications theorist. Explore interesting quotes on news.
Marshall McLuhan: 832 quotes16 likes

“By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 25

“If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.”

Marshall McLuhan

To Wilfred Watson, October 6 1965. Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 325
1960s

“The artists of our culture, 'the antennae of the race,' had tuned in to the new ground and begun exploring discontinuity and simultaneity.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 47

“The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 233

“The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.”

Marshall McLuhan

Tyuonyi, Volumes 1-2, 1985, p. 60
1980s

“When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Hot & Cool (1967), p. 261

“Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.99

“All of the new media have enriched our perceptions of language and older media. They are to the man-made environment what species are to biology.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 84

“The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 14

“When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total. (p. 105)”

Marshall McLuhan

1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)

“Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.202

“The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, A McLuhan Sourcebook (1995), p. 291

“Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 33

“Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 105

“Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 223

“The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1950s, The Mechanical Bride (1951), p. 21

“Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.</i”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 11

“Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 63

“The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.”

Marshall McLuhan

quoted in "The Prospects of Recording" by Glenn Gould, The Glenn Gould reader, 1984, p. 345
1980s

“The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 152