A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Audience, Public, Mass (44 quotes)
Now, the difference between a public and a mass audience has nothing to do with cultural values. It has to do with the fact that a public consists of separate individuals, each with a private point of view. A mass audience has no point of view at all. It is so involved – people are so involved with one another at the speed of electric circuitry that they have a sense of relationship and offer responsibility to their society that is quite new. Involvement in the mass or electric circuitry creates a tremendous sense of responsibility and anxiety that is new.
Marshall McLuhan
“The Open Mind”, TV interview with Eric Goldman, WNBC television, March 1966, transcript p 16
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Audience, Public, Mass
Rhetoric is the science of the audience. I mean, all conventional, disparaging notions aside, rhetoric is a science, and an art, it’s one of the arts of the logos. It is the art of persuasive speech, actually, it’s the art of persuasion, which is to say it’s the art of transforming audiences. You could care less what you think before, during, or after a speech as long as when you’re done they do what you want them to do, and the cheap practitioners of rhetoric on these shores, and in recent times have been the advertisers
Eric McLuhan
Derrick De Kerckhove interview with Eric McLuhan, in Circa, 1982, transcript, p 7
Year: 1982
Chapters:
Audience, Public, Mass | Rhetoric
Various inventions like the telescope, the microscope, the spectroscope, and the camera obscura coincided with the landscape interest in painting and poetry to foster a spectator attitude to the world. The very idea of “views” as a way of expressing moral and political attitudes arose at this time. Popular metaphors naturally provide an index to changing experience.
“Technology and Political Change,” International Journal, Vol 7, No. 3, Summer, (1952), p 191
Year: 1952
For Cicero, wisdom is eloquence because only by eloquence can knowledge be applied to the minds and hearts of men. It is applied knowledge that obsesses the mind of Cicero the Roman as it did the mind of Francis Bacon. And for Cicero, as for Bacon, the technique of application depends upon the Roman brick procedure of uniform repeatability and homogeneous segments of knowledge.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), p 24
Year: 1962
Yes, everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light, it's called being mass man, by the way, one of the big marks of the loss of identity is nostalgia and so, revivals on all hands in every phase of life today, revivals of clothing, of dances, of music, of shows, of everything. We live by the revival, it tells us who we are or where.
Video TVO apppearance with Mike McManus, “Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977), transcript, 04:39
Year: 1977
As the market society defined itself, literature moved into the role of consumer commodity. The public became patron. Art reversed its role from guide for perception into convenient amenity or package. But the producer or artist was compelled, as never before, to study the effect of his art. This in turn revealed to human attention new dimensions in the functions of art. As manipulators of the mass market tyrannized over the artist, the artist in isolation achieved new clairvoyance concerning the crucial role of design and of art as a means to human order and fulfillment.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 275
Year: 1962
Chapter:
Attention
… a mass society is one in which personal diversity is encouraged while at the same time everybody reacts and interacts simultaneously to every stimulus.
Playboy interview, 1969, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995 edition), p 262
Year: 1969
In sport there is no game without an audience. The greatest game minus an audience is a rehearsal which is quite the opposite of a replay. In sport there is usually a winner – i.e. both good and bad news, depending on publics. Sports, like weather, are dramatizings of the whole environment. Any game, as such, is a dramatization of the major motives of a community, be it ball or bull or ping pong. These actions are special environments that can be as totally involving as weather and stocks and war.
“TV News,” Printed ad for ABC News, 1973
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Services, Disservices
Drawn to McLuhan #12
Rocket Richard, the Canadian hockey player, used to comment on the poor acoustics of some arenas. He felt that the puck off his stick rode on the roar of the crowd.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition (1964), p 241
Year: 1964
[Referring to the trial of William L. Calley for slaughter of 22 people in a Vietnamese village] When the audience of a trial includes an entire population or a nation, it is the public itself that appears as the criminal, and the culprit who appears as hero. May this not have happened with the trial and execution of Charles I?
“Roles Masks, and Performances,” 1971, p 527
Year: 1971
The mass is created by speed and everyone reading the same thing or doing the same thing at the same time. It is like Einstein’s idea that any kind or particle of matter can acquire infinite mass at the speed of light. Any minute, trite bit of news acquires infinite potential at the speed of electricity. Anything becomes momentous at electric speeds.
“TV in a New Light” (1967), p 96
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Speedups
… a mass society is one in which personal diversity is encouraged while at the same time everybody reacts and interacts simultaneously to every stimulus.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 72, reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 261
Year: 1969
Now, the difference between a public and a mass audience has nothing to do with cultural values. It has to do with the fact that a public consists of separate individuals, each with a private point of view. A mass audience has no point of view at all. It is so involved – people are so involved with one another at the speed of electric circuitry that they have a sense of relationship and offer responsibility to their society that is quite new. Involvement in the mass or electric circuitry creates a tremendous sense of responsibility and anxiety that is new.
“The Open Mind”, TV interview with Eric Goldman, WNBC television, March 1966, transcript p 16
Year: 1966
…there are other extraordinary flips resulting from technological advance. And the general tendency is to use the audience as a work force instead of as a target or consumer.
“Information Hunt Looms Big”, in College and University Journal, Vol 6, No. 2, Spring, 1967, p 5
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Chiasmus, Flips, Reversals | McLuhanisms & Zingers
The manuscript, the handwritten book could not produce a public, a reading public or a market for goods or anything else.
“Television In A New Light” (1965) in Stanley Donner, editor, The Meaning of Commercial Television, University of Texas Press (1966), p 98
Year: 1965
The new print-created public inspired Montaigne: “I owe a complete portrait of myself to my public.”
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 103
Year: 1968
The new public as mirror reveals the private dimension, spurring the new enterprise of self-expression.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 105
Year: 1968
“Here comes everybody.”
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1940) – in McLuhan’s Dewline deck (1969), King of Hearts
Year: 1940
Chapter:
Oft-Cited Quotes
No, there’s no game without the public. Without the audience, there is no game. In a theatre, if there is no audience at all, you have a rehearsal, but you don’t have a play.
“Speaking Freely”, interview with Edwin Newman on WNBC-TV, December 27, 1970, transcript, p 9
Year: 1970
[Of his friend the pianist Glenn Gould who ceased playing for live audiences, and played thereafter only in recording studios]. Gould feels far more affinity for the engineer than for a fashionable public that comes to the concert hall not so much to hear as to be seen. Gould’s argument is, in part, that by eliminating the concert audience he can play for the composer. It may sound a bit like Charles Lamb’s expostulation: “Hang posterity, I’ll write for the past.”
“Roles, Masks, and Performances” (1971), pp 524-525
Year: 1971
What “turns on” a ball game? Essentially, any game is a dramatization of some of the interests and motives of its audience. If the audience were absent the “game” could only be a practice or rehearsal. It would have no content… The public both makes and “turns on” the game.
“Putting on the Media” (1971), p 6
Year: 1971
The more you know about the public, the more they take over the show.
“The lost Marshall McLuhan tapes” interview with Peter C. Newman, 1972, published in Macleans, July, 2013, p 51
Year: 1972
Chapters:
McLuhanisms & Zingers | Participation
In 1903, W. B. Yeats, meditating on the "emotion of multitude," explained that it is achieved by a discontinuous parallel between two actions.
“The Argument: Causality in the Electric World”, in Technology and Culture, Vol.14, No. 1, January (1973), p 15, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound # 3, (2005), p 25
Year: 1973
High mobility on the part of the audience makes of music festivals a new social ritual which, in turn, is transferred to film and recording. In all of this, the audience itself becomes a major performer.
“Liturgy and the Microphone”, (1974), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 112
Year: 1974
Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being “mass man.” It began quite a long time ago.
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 7:33
Year: 1977
Everybody in a crowd is a nobody; the crowd is mask.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 146
Year: 1988
Chapters:
Masks | McLuhanisms & Zingers
One of the strange results of a speed-up of information and speed-up of access to information is that the total audience can become involved in decision-making.
“Information Hunt Looms Big” (1967), p 5
Year: 1967
The area of attention has shifted from the older characters to the ground. Now that includes audience. The audience has now become actor. Don't you think this is a tendency as a result of developments in our time?
“TV News as a New Mythic Form” (1970), in Understanding Me (2003), p 164
Year: 1970
The new environment is just as unconscious as the old one had been initially. As a merely automatic sequence, the succession of environments and of the dramatics thereto appertaining tend to be rather tiresome, if only because the audience is very prone to participate in the dramatics with an enthusiasm proportioned to their unawareness.
“Letter to Ashley Montagu, April 13, 1965, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 322
Year: 1965
The subplot world, the subenvironment, is really that which includes the audience, and it is the power to affect this kind of inclusion that is the mystery of humor, and that explains the rapid change of humor styles – because one style joke will not accommodate a very large proportion of the audience from one period to another.
“Our Dawning Electronic Age” (1965), p 12
Year: 1965
The artist is inspired by people who are lacking awareness of the things of which he is intensely aware.
The Place and Function of Art in Contemporary Life, UNESCO Speech, 1977, Transcript p 1
Year: 1977
The audience is the speaker. The audience is the actor… Eliot explains this matter apropos Tiresias in his “notes” to the Waste Land.
“The Lewis Vortex” (1971), p 5
Year: 1971
The mysterious thing about this kind of speed-up of information, whereby the gap is closed between the experience and the meaning, is that the public begins to participate directly in actions which it had previously heard about at a distance in place or time. At instant speeds the audience become actor, and the spectators become participants.
“At the Moment of Sputnik—” (1974), typescript, p 10
Year: 1974
A great crowd at a game today generates a kind of massive power which lifts individuals out of their puny ineffectual status as individuals and unites them with the central social energies. We live in a world charged with mechanical power. But the sense and reality of that power remain abstract until they are dramatized before a great audience.
“Baseball Is Culture” (1952), typescript, p 3
Year: 1952
The “crowd,” as it increases in scope, simultaneously develops the feeling of loss of identity at the very core of its cohesion. The greater the proximity and the greater the numbers, the greater the sense of loss of individual significance and control.
“Media and the Inflation CROWD” (1973), typescript, p 3
Year: 1973
The public, or la publique as Montaigne called it, came into existence in the sixteenth century with typography. It never existed in the Middle Ages and it no longer exists today. Under electric conditions there is no public.
“Television in a New Light” (1967), p 96
Year: 1967
As soon as the public exists, the author exists. Until the author exists the public does not exist. They make each other. So, when Montaigne discovered the public, he discovered self-expression as the same moment.
“Television in a New Light” (1967), p 97
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Complementarities
The public is that which inspires the artist. Western aesthetics seem to assume that the artist is inspired by transcendental ideas. In fact and in practice, all art is the product of the artist’s encounter with his public.
“The Place and Function of Art—” (1976), pp 26-27
Year: 1976
While attention remains riveted on the rear-view mirror of audience ratings and packaged programs, the audience, in fact, has moved ever closer to an active role. Vision of this spectacular flip has been obscured by many factors including a misunderstanding of the quiz shows and their fate. A few years ago the American public had a sense of involvement in the quiz shows.
"Great Change-overs For You”, in Vogue, Vol. 148, No. 1, July 1st, 1966, p 62
Year: 1966
…the audience is, after all, the environment that the artifact and the museum have to cope with. An audience is the surround. It is the new environment for the artifact.
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, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 66
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Environment | Museum
... the fact that touch creates an interval involves the audience very much more, the interval has to be closed. When you create an interval you have to close and it is the closing of the interval that creates participation and rhythm.
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, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 67
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Interval | Tactile, Touch
I have watched people in museums for many years and it is rather interesting, both in Europe and America. You find a person will walk up to an object and look at it casually, read the label, give it a cursory glance, and walk on. They have not really looked at anything, because they are data oriented and they figure that now they’ve got th4e answer to that and they know it is tenth-century this or that, so they walk away from it. So the idea of setting up a gallery which just asks questions is going to force people to look at that or touch it if possible but at any rate look at it.
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, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 71
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Interval | Tactile, Touch
On the other hand we are sort of circling or cycling back to that pre-visual culture – so that much of the latest culture in our world is getting very close to the most primitive culture in terms of the sensory bias. The real gripe we have about the beats, and the hippies, the teenagers, teenyboppers is that they are so primitive.
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 9-10, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 72
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Interval | Tactile, Touch
The researcher is a man who deliberately creates interfaces in order to make discoveries. He deliberately sets off situations that will irritate one another, until you suddenly get a flash insight. But it is very rarely that… this is a matter of territoriality…. Each man is defending his own territory.
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 9-10, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 73
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Interval | Tactile, Touch
You may have heard about the two mice in the nose cone and one says to the other, “How do you like this kind of work?” And the other says, “Oh well, it’s better than cancer research.”
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 9-10, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 79\
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Interval | Tactile, Touch