A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Well, I think people who are subjected to the arrangement of language visually in lines, highly sequential and precisely rigid, develop habits of arranging their lives, arranging their whole social existence, which are very closely geared to these forms. They’re not especially aware of this. Linearity, though, is not characteristic of radio or television or movies. And so we have been subjected to tremendous new forces, new influences which have broken up the older habits acquired from the print world.
“The Communications Revolution,” a conversation with Gilbert Seldes and Keith Tyler at Ohio State University (1960), in McLuhan Speaks transcript
Year: 1960
↪ Also at #7320
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan