A dictionary of Marshall McLuhanβs quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
Β©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
Your search term is America, North America. Scroll down for the results!
π Search Within Selection
America, North America is being viewed as a chapter. Search for all appearances
Viewing chapter America, North America (36 quotes)
ββ¦so we were literally watching the biggest light show ever, watching what was happening in the United States from Toronto.β
Ted Carpenter
From a 2011 taped interview about working with Marshall McLuhan on Explorations in the 1950s, the recording is accessible online; transcript: 5:12
Year: 2011
Chapter:
America, North America
America is 100% 18th century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogyβthe basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the U.S.A.
βLetter to Ezra Pound, December 21, (1948)β, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 224
Year: 1948
Basic modes of cognition on this continent [are] not linguistic but technological.
βLetter to Ezra Pound, January 5, 1951β, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 218
Year: 1951
By the time of the power press in the early 19th century, the newspapers were rapidly changing the character of politics by creating public opinion. In a new country like America the new medium of the press created the first instance of a state founded on public opinion. English political forms, predating the press, still depend much less on public opinion, as do those of Canada.
Counterblast, (1969), 125
Year: 1969
Should the energy which activates the ad-men (and the industrial stalks on which they are the passion-flowers) be transferred to the world of political speculation and creation, American could still fulfill many of its broken Utopian promises, because its Jeffersonian tradition is still intact, and likewise its psychological vigor.
βAmerican Advertisingβ, published In Horizon, No.93-4, October (1947), reprinted in Mass Culture: the Popular Arts in America,(1957), reprinted as McLuhan Unbound #9 (2005), p 18
Year: 1947
Chapter:
Advertising
As an example of the new relations prevailing in the English-speaking countries, a short time ago, Cyril Connolly suspended the operations of Horizon (England's leading literary magazine) with the pronouncement that his magazine had ceased to have a function. All the best pieces he published, he said, were being sent from America. True or false, this was a revolutionary view. It amounted to saying that the cultural shadow which for centuries England cast over the arts on this side of the Atlantic has vanished. Instead, American arts are blanketing English intellectual life just as American movies have for two decades been providing English children with new speech habits. There is no longer any excuse for the immigrant humility in artistic matters which for so long pervaded American cultural life.
βDefrosting Canadian Cultureβ, in American Mercury, Vol. 74, No. 339, (1952), p 94
Year: 1952
The Godfather is in reality a documentary about the rise of a new oral culture in electronic America. America, the only country ever founded on the printed word, has now reverted to the pre-literate forms of human awareness and organization, first under the impact of radio and then of TV.
βLibraries, Past, Present, Futureβ (1970), p 4
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Oral
In America, people can tolerate their images in mirror or photo, but they are made uncomfortable by the recorded sound of their own voices. The photo and visual worlds are secure areas of anesthesia.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 202
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Oral
Drawn to McLuhan #12
Now an American not only does not like acting or putting on a public, but he does not put on a corporate or standard voice when he speaks. He uses his private voice, and this, of course, enables the Americans to have no class consciousness and no class structure.
βTV News as a New Mythic Form, 1970β, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 168
Year: 1970
A common observation of European visitors to America is that life here is more collectivized and stereotyped than communists have ever aimed to achieve. It was always the central theme of Marx that direct political action was unnecessary. The machine was the revolutionary solvent of bourgeois society. Allow the dynamic logic of the machine full play in any kind of society and it will, said Marx, become communist automatically. Certainly America is far more advanced on the road to a collective, centralized, consumer's paradise than any other part of the world. May not some of the American panic about the communist threat be a dim recognition of this paradox?
βRevolutionary Conservatism.β Unpublished typescript, 1952
Year: 1952
Thus the English and American cultures in particular were overwhelmed by print, since in the 16th century they had only rudimentary defences to set up against the new printed word. The rest of Europe, richer in plastic and oral culture, was less blitzed by the printing press. And the Orient has so far had many kinds of resistance to offer.
βCulture without Literacyβ, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 123 reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 309, additional reprint in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 133. and McLuhan Unbound #6, (2017)
Year: 1953
The American Government was the first to be founded on the concept of public opinion.
βNew Media as Political Formsβ in Explorations 3, August (1954), p 124, reprinted as McLuhan Unbound #14 ,(2017), p 12
Year: 1954
Chapter:
Democracy
Americans have lost their sense of identity because of the speed of information. The American bureaucracy, political and educational, was set up for very slow speeds of the print word and for railways. At electric speeds, nothing in the USA makes sense. The most benign political democracy becomes a police state as soon as you improve the speed of communication. Everybody then becomes under surveillance, everybody is put into a data bank, and there is no freedom left.
βThe New Majority,β Interview with Ed Fitzgerald, CBC-TV, (1970), transcript p 6 (11:25 in the video)
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Speedups
In America, they tend to have these great big screens for the game itself, so that you can watch the game on television while the game is in process. This is a kind of situation that I think invites an enormous awareness of actual process, to participate in the kind of replay of the thing, while it is still ongoing. Participation in replay is a form of pattern recognition that is new in the media and has, I'd say, rather large consequences, mostly cognitive, mostly consequences that will affect our nature of our cognition and awareness and I would think entirely only in the direction of extreme self-awareness. I once asked a famous quarterback, in American football, on television, once asked him what the effect of the instant replay had been on the game of football and he said βWe have now to play the game, in such a way, that the audience can watch the actual process that were performingβ.
Speech on Video: The Medium Is the Message β 1977 (Part 2 Of 3), Youtube, Transcript: 06.53
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Pattern Recognition
Being anti-Red made it impossible for [Americans] to read the message of Hitler. But their failure was as nothing compared to our present one. The American stake in literacy as a technology or uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry, and social life is totally threatened by the electric technology.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 17
Year: 1964
The threat of Stalin or Hitler was external. The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed. It is, however, no time to suggest strategies when the threat has not even been acknowledged to exist.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 17-18
Year: 1964
The railway radically altered the personal outlooks and patterns of social interdependence. It bred and nurtured the American Dream.
The Medium is the Massage (1967), p 72
Year: 1967
The American image of itself, American goals, American directions, have been scrapped by electric speeds. I am not making value judgments. I am simply observing that if you accelerate any structure beyond a certain speed it collapses.
βThe Global Theatreβ, in Ekistics 190, September (1971), p182
Year: 1971
It may be worth mentioning the structural features of analogy since with the computer there has risen the possibility of extending consciousness itself as a technological environment
βInnovation Is Obsoleteβ, in Evergreen Review, Vol. 15, No. 90, June (1971), p 48
Year: 1971
Since television America came of age. Americans got a lot of trouble, but since television they are not afraid of serious culture. Television trains everyone. It has deepened the American psyche. America is no longer that visually dominated culture. It used to be concerned with the outside appearance and the packaging. Now it does not care. The visual world is no longer dominant in America. You can tell that the moment you see the kids, dressed in their crazy way. They are not dressed for the eye.
βInterview with J.P.M. van Santen in Torontoβ, October 25, 1972, Transcript, p 2
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Television
In the same way, the American south has a variety of traditional English dialects and an overriding rhythm that is corporate and oral.
Liturgy And Mediaβ in The Critic Vol.31, No. 3, January-February (1973), p 18, reprinted in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (1999), p 122
Year: 1973
Since the United States is the only country in history to begin with print technology as its guideline and pattern for all its establishments, it is, of all countries, the least able to confront the advent of electric technology, which contradicts every facet of specialist rational order.
Take Today; The Executive As Dropout, (1972), p 272
Year: 1972
Is the entire Watergate affair a large social and political conflict developing between conventional written procedures and innovative acoustic technology? Has the United States become politically schizoid?
βWhen a President Streaksβ, in Indian Press (New Delhi, India), July, (1974), p 11
Year: 1974
Today, for example, the entire Watergate affair is intimately linked with the world of the microphone and the recording, creating a great new acoustic dimension in politics which is in direct conflict with the press, the Constitution, and the printed word.
βLiturgy and the Microphoneβ, (1974), p 16
Year: 1974
The Watergate episodeβ¦has reversed all secrecy into show business, and all privacy into broadcasting. The turning of the inside outside and of the outside inside, exactly parallels the power of the TV medium which threatens to reverse the American way of life. Whereas North Americans had for centuries gone outside to be alone and inside to be social, TV has brought the outside into our intimate social lives, and taken our social lives out into the public domain.
βLiturgy and the Microphoneβ, (1974), p 17
Year: 1974
For America, the electronic revolution from industrial products and consumerism to information and custom-made services, is a reversal of the entire way of life, with goals and directions suddenly yielding to roles and figures. America has found the paths of industrial uniformity and continuity no longer to its taste. Living in a new environment of instant electric information has shifted American attention from specific goals to the cognitive thrills of pattern recognition, a change that is manifested directly by the TV service of the instant replay. Is not the instant replay the externalizing of the cognitive principle itself? For the replay would seem to offer both cognition and re-cognition; the same pattern of reversal, in the transition from the industrial to the electric age, appears in the role of Sputnik (1957) in placing the planet inside a man-made environment.
"The Implications of Cultural Uniformity", in SUPERCULTURE: American Popular Culture and Europe, 1975, p 54
Year: 1975
McLUHAN: In North America, we conquered nature.
FORSDALE: Did we?
McLUHAN: We did. We broke it, smashed it to pieces. Now weβre trying to put it back together again. We conquered nature, and it is no longer just an enemy, but a problem. It is now a broken enemy, like the Red Man. Itβs in flight. Itβs broken, and weβre now using new technology to support the old nature. Weβre now propping up nature in North Americaβ¦
βForsdale interviewβ (1976), in Marshall McLuhan: The Man and the Message, (1988) p 15
Year: 1976
Sorry that you feel so helpless about the U.S. A. situation with regard to TV. The social and psychic cost to the community are fantastic.
Letter to Dr. Leslie Brinegar, Asst. Superintendent, Dept. of Education, State of California, September 14, 1977 [not in Letters]
Year: 1977
If you are asking about the ordinary secular climate of the Church, or its prospects as a secular institution, I should think the opportunities for survival are a heck of a lot better than those of the United States or any other secular institution.
Interview with Edward Wakin (1977), republished as βOur Only Hope Is Apocalypseβ, in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 59
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Democracy
The recent war with Iraq was a further acting out of that return to tribal values facilitated by the acoustic properties of electric media. Radio, loudspeakers, and audiocassettes brought the Mullah's cry to the force of a thunderclap, on a regional scale.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, (1989), p 19
Year: 1989
In the age of the electronic information environment the big nations of the First World are losing both their identities and goals. France, Germany, England, and the United States are nations whose identities and goals were shaped by the rise of the self-regulating markets of the nineteenth century, markets whose quantitative equilibrium has been obsolesced by the dominance of the new world of instant information.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, (1989), p 150
Year: 1989
The fact that the great vortex of interface between inside and outside in North America has gone unnoted by historians and psychologists for two centuries and more, is testimony to the vast subliminal energies that are outside our consciousness.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, (1989), p 163
Year: 1989
Today, when the old industrial hardware is obsolescent, we can see that the Canadian condition of low-profile identity and multiple borders approaches the ideal pattern of electronic living.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, (1989), p 166
Year: 1989
But as I said, the Negro arouses hostility in whites precisely because they subliminally recognize that he is closest to that tribal depth involvement and simultaneity and harmony that is the richest and most highly developed expression of human consciousness.
βPlayboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Mediaβ. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 68, reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), pp 256-257
Year: 1969
Chapters:
Consciousness | Eye vs Ear
McLUHAN: β¦..The United States as a nation is doomed, in any case, to break up into a series of regional and racial ministates, and such a civil war would merely accelerate that process PLAYBOY: On what do you base your prediction that the United States will disintegrate? McLUHAN: Actually, in this case as in most of my work, Iβm βpredictingβ what has already happened and merely extrapolating a current process to its logical conclusion. The Balkanization of the United States as a continental political structure has been going on for some years now, and racial chaos is merely one of several catalysts for change. This isnβt a peculiarly American phenomenon; as I pointed out earlier, the electric media always produce psychically integrating and socially decentralizing eο¬ects, and this aο¬ects not only political institutions within the existing state but the national entities themselves.
βPlayboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Mediaβ. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 68, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 257
Year: 1969
The advantage of living in Canada, in general, is to watch the United States making fools of themselves. They have become a research lab in which all sorts of hideous experiments are performed while we stand by and watch them kill themselves off. Canada is in the very fortunate themselves position of being a scientific observer of the most hideous experiments being performed on vast bodies of people.
βSpeaking of Winnipeg,β 1974, p 28
Year: 1974
Chapter:
Canada
As Burke said about the rebellious American colonies, βI do not know how to indict a whole people.β β¦ In the same sway, no value judgments are possible when youβre dealing with a whole people. That is, no point of view is possible. Not unless you just wish to appear foolish.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October 9-15, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 80
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Values & Value Judgments