A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

In our own world, we are hurrying back and forth across town at morning and night to situations we could easily encompass by closed circuit. Why do the wheels keep hurrying us downtown? Some people are puzzled by this and have come up with the answer: it’s the filing cabinet downtown in the office that makes it still necessary to rush back and forth from suburbs to office. That it is this obsession with the contents of the file – documents, contracts, data. All of these materials could be just as available on closed circuit at home.
CBC-TV Take Thirty, 1965 (quoted on p 179 of Forward Through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections On and By Marshall McLuhan, edited by Paul Benedetti and Nancy DeHart, (1997)
Year: 1965
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan