Marshall McLuhan: Technology

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

“Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence.”

Marshall McLuhan book The Gutenberg Galaxy

Source: The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 186

“Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.”

Marshall McLuhan book The Gutenberg Galaxy

Source: The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 245

“Our technology forces us to live mythically”

Marshall McLuhan

“The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 98

“Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 68

“When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.”

Marshall McLuhan

Location, Volume 1 Issues 1-2, 1963, p. 44
1960s

“Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 200

“The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 8

“War is never anything less than accelerated technological change.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 102

“Every technology contrived and “outered” by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 174

“A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 245

“The most human thing about us is our technology.”

Marshall McLuhan

Man and the future of organizations, Volume 5, School of Business Administration, Georgia State University, 1974, p. 19
1970s

“The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 61

“After childhood, the senses specialize via the channels of dominant technologies and social weaponries.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to The Listener October 1971, Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 443
1970s

“Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 171

“In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 4

“Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 71

“The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 21

“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

“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