Marshall McLuhan Men Quotations

What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form.

Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put.

Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr

The 'expert' is the man who stays put.

It is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art.

In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology... But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit.

... Their power to see environments as they really are.

You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says that the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?

Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.

Any breakdown is a breakthrough.

The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling.

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion...

Money is a poor man's credit card.

Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.

The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.

An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.

If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire.

Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.

There is no more great men; there is only great committees.

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.

The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature.

A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.

Explore the situation. Statements are expendable. Don't keep on looking in the rearview mirror and defending the status quo which is outmoded the moment it happened.

For the satiated, both sex and speed are pretty boring until the element of danger and even death is introduced.

Electronic man has no physical body.

The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men.

Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.

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

The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis.

The hallucinogenic world, in environmental terms, can be considered as a forlorn effort of man to match the speed of power of hisextended nervous system (which we call the "electronic world") by intensifying the activity of his inner nervous system.

The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.

Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been ... destroyed by sudden environmental change.

As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.

"Work" does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.

Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.

We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions.

Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.

[On Jimmy Carter] "Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place.

Technology is that which separates us from our environment.

To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.

With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.

The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.

Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.

The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.

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

The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.

The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it's an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.

The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.