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

“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

“The 4 aspects of each of the media actually constitute the four features of all metaphors. In other words, all human technologies whatever are, in the fullest sense, linguistic outerings, or utterings, of man.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 275

“Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 85

“Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 86

“Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.”

Marshall McLuhan

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

“We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, A McLuhan Sourcebook (1995), p. 276

“When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p. 180

“The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 136

“The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 55

“It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 82

“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

“Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 99

“With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 177

“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

“For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1950s, The Mechanical Bride (1951), p. 85; "Magic that Changes Mood")

“If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 31

“At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

“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