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

“Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 17

“New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 47

“In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man’s physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 8

“We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 16)”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

“The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive. (p. 201)”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 47

“The present volume to this point might be regarded as a gloss on a single text of Harold Innis: "The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century."”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 216; McLuhan here quotes "Minerva's Owl" (1947), by Innis, an address to the Royal Society of Canada, published in The Bias of Communication (1951)

“New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.”

Marshall McLuhan

Arts in society, Volume 3, 1964, p. 240
1960s

“The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 210

“Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 67