A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Corporate Consciousness (39 quotes)
“[He had me wondering] ...are we the transistors of a planetary circuitry?”
Robert Fulford
In Derrick de Kerckhove’s Ideas series on Marshall McLuhan, 1982, CBC Radio
Year: 1982
Chapter:
Corporate Consciousness
The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 80
Year: 1964
Chapters:
After Language | Computer | Dropout | Extending Consciousness | Language | Living Unity | Predictions
There is available the lyrical testimony of a very Romantic biologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in his Phenomenon of Man:
“…thanks to the prodigious biological event represented by the discovery of electro-magnetic waves, each individual finds himself henceforth (actively and passively) simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the earth.” [p 240]
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 32
Year: 1962
Chapters:
Environment | Mastering Technology
It had not occurred to Innis that electricity is in effect an extension of the nervous system as a kind of global membrane.
Introduction to H.A. Innis’s The Bias of Communication (1962), p 15, also in “Media and Cultural Change,” in The Essential McLuhan (1995), p 94
Year: 1962
Chapters:
Global Village | Mastering Technology
There is no privacy and no private parts. In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure.
“Notes on Burroughs” (1964) in Media Research (1997), p 89
Year: 1964
Such a universality of conscious being for mankind was dreamt of by Dante, who believed that men would remain mere broken fragments until they should be united in an inclusive consciousness. What we have today, instead of a social consciousness electrically ordered, however, is a private subconsciousness or individual "point of view" rigorously imposed by older mechanical technology. This is a perfectly natural result of "culture lag" or conflict, in a world suspended between two technologies.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 108
Year: 1964
The computer is the first component of that hybrid of video-related technologies which will move us toward a world consciousness. It steps up the velocity of logical sequential calculations to the speed of light, reducing numbers to body count by touch. When pushed to its limits, the product of the computer reverses into simultaneous pattern recognition (acoustic space), eroding or bypassing mechanical processes in all sequential operations. It brings back the Pythagorean occult embodied in the idea that "numbers are all"; and at the same time it dissolves hierarchy in favor of decentralization. Any business corporation requiring the use of computers for communication and record-keeping will have no other alternative but to decentralize.
“Global Robotism: The Dissatisfactions”, in The Global Village with Bruce Powers (1989), p 103
Year: 1989
Chapters:
Centralized / Decentralized | Computer | Extending Consciousness | Future | Mastering Technology | Predictions
That electro-magnetism as such is an extension of the central nervous system is a persistent theme of Teilhard de Chardin in his Phenomenon of Man. It is a concept familiar to biologists and psychologists alike.
Letter to John I. Snyder, August 14, 1963, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 292
Year: 1963
Chapters:
Global Village | Mastering Technology
Drawn to McLuhan #7
PLAYBOY: Isn't this projection of an electronically induced world consciousness more mystical than technological?
MCLUHAN: Yes — as mystical as this most advanced theories of modem nuclear physics. Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.
“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 The Essential McLuhan (1995), p 262
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Extending Consciousness
Evolution [in the electric age] became not an involuntary response of organisms to new conditions but a part of the consensus of human consciousness.
Counterblast (1969), p 143
Year: 1969
Chapters:
Consciousness | Evolution
As we push our electric technology it will flip/open in the form of corporate consciousness. The present interim is baffling because it has a closed character, with which we know not how to deal. An electric system is very much like a small tribal society—that is, ecological and homeostatic.
Letter to John I. Snyder, Jr., August 4, 1963, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 291
Year: 1963
Chapters:
Between Two Ages | Chiasmus, Flips, Reversals | Ecology | Extending Consciousness | Present [The]
Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical steps would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass language in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 80
Year: 1964
The computer is the first component of that hybrid of video-related technologies which will move us toward a world consciousness. It steps up the velocity of logical sequential calculations to the speed of light, reducing numbers to body count by touch. When pushed to its limits, the product of the computer reverses into simultaneous pattern recognition (acoustic space), eroding or bypassing mechanical processes in all sequential operations. It brings back the Pythagorean occult embodied in the idea that "numbers are all"; and at the same time it dissolves hierarchy in favor of decentralization. Any business corporation requiring the use of computers for communication and record-keeping will have no other alternative but to decentralize.”
“Global Robotism: The Dissatisfactions”, in The Global Village with Bruce Powers (1989), p 103
Year: 1989
Chapters:
Centralized / Decentralized | Computer | Extending Consciousness | Future | Mastering Technology | Predictions
Mechanical systems are not closed in the way that electric ones are. As we push our electric technology it will flip, open in the form of corporate consciousness.
Letter to John I. Snyder, Jr., August 4, 1963, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p 291
Year: 1963
We are individually overwhelmed by corporate consciousness and by the inclusive experience of mankind both past and present. It would be a comic irony if men proved unable to cope with abundance and riches in both the economic and psychic order. It is not likely to happen.
“Cybernation and Culture” (1966), in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 103
Year: 1966
Chapters:
Anticipating Change | Individual
Well this: we then hijack the [Inuit] group with Anik, with the satellites, and we put them on the air. You heard the story about having telephones put in there, but the people didn't want any private phones. Everybody wanted a party line so they could listen in to everybody else. They refused to have any private phones up in the Eskimo country. They insisted that everybody's conversation be available to everybody simultaneously.
“Jean Pare interview”, in Forces magazine, a Hydro Quebec publication, No.22, (1973), p 24
Year: 1973
Chapters:
Privacy | Tribal Societies
… 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
To create an antienvironment for such electric technology would seem to require a technological extension of both private and corporate consciousness. The awareness and opposition of the individual are in these circumstances as irrelevant as they are futile.
Through The Vanishing Point with Harley Parker, (1968), p 244
Year: 1968
Men are related laterally by kinship but there are no hierarchies and no authority. Moreover the horizontal metaphor (which provides the sleeping giant Finn McCool of Finnegans Wake) indicates a state of collective consciousness. A state of homogeneity and non-differentiation which in pagan theory proceeded the fall of man.
“The God-Making Machines of the Modern World”, Review of Foundations of Social Survival, by John Lindberg (Columbia), in The Commonweal, Vol. LIX, no. 24. March 19, 1954, p 606
Year: 1954
Working concepts of "collective consciousness" in advertising agencies have in turn given salience and practical effectiveness to these "magical" notions of language.”
Letter to Ezra Pound, January 5, 1951, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 219
Year: 1951
The man who has something to say is the man who has mastered some segment of public awareness. He is capable of lighting up some dim, fusty corner of embryonic social consciousness.
“New Media as Political Forms”, in Explorations 3, 1954, p 125
Year: 1954
In the same way as the entire globe becomes a single computer or what de Chardin calls a noosphere, the advent of satellite broadcasting makes every one of the more than two hundred and fifty cultures of the globe as immediately present to each other as are the telephone subscribers of a single town.
“The Electronic Age – The Age of Implosion” (1962) in Media Research (1997), p 35
Year: 1962
Chapters:
Extending Consciousness | Giedion, Sigfried | Global Village | Mastering Technology | Predictions
Incidentally, I am not a fan of De Chardin’s. I find the evolutionary stuff very tiresome. The idea that anything is better because it comes later, is surely borrowed from pre-electric technologies. By the way, there is one thing that is enormously faster than light or electricity, and that is thought. That is why pattern recognition is only possible to the human mind.
Letter to Tom Easterbrook, 1972
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Giedion, Sigfried | Mastering Technology
The tendency of electric media is to create a kind of organic interdependence among all the institutions of society, emphasizing de Chardin's view that the discovery of electromagnetism is to be regarded as "a prodigious biological event.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 247
Year: 1964
Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, lived and wrote in a tradition of thought in which it was and is considered that language is a human technology that has impaired and diminished the values of the collective unconscious.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 79
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Language
Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 227
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Advertising
Blake had the insights but not the technical resources for rendering his vision. Paradoxically, it was not through the book but through the development of the mass press, especially the telegraph press, that poets found the artistic keys to the world of simultaneity, or of modern myth. It was in the format of the daily press that Rimbaud and Mallarmé discovered the means of rendering the interplay of all the functions of what Coleridge called the "esemplastic" imagination. * For the popular press offers no single vision, no point of view, but a mosaic of the postures of the collective consciousness, as Mallarmé proclaimed.
“THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED or the Plight of Mass Man in an Individualist Society” in The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of Typographic Man (1962), p 267-268. * McLuhan is referring to his article “Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press", in The Sewanee Review, Vol.62, No.1, Jan-March (1954) p 38-55. Reprinted in The Interior Landscape The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), pages 5-21
Year: 1962
For if the Catholic is the champion of rational principles and individual reason how can he understand primitive man who is embedded in a world of magical irrationalities and collective consciousness?
“Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” The McAuley Lectures: Christian Humanism in Letters, Saint Joseph College, West Hartford Connecticut,(1954),p 49, reprinted in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 153
Year: 1954
Chapter:
Catholic Church
“It had not occurred to Innis that electricity is in effect an extension of the nervous system as a kind of global membrane.”
Introduction to H.A. Innis’s The Bias of Communication (1962), p 15, also in “Media and Cultural Change,” in The Essential McLuhan (1995), p 94
Year: 1962
Chapters:
Global Village | Mastering Technology
Such a universality of conscious being for mankind was dreamt of by Dante, who believed that men would remain mere broken fragments until they should be united in an inclusive consciousness. What we have today, instead of a social conciousness electrically ordered, however, is a private subconsciousness or individual "point of view" rigorously imposed by older mechanical technology. This is a perfectly natural result of "culture lag" or conflict, in a world suspended between two technologies.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 108
Year: 1964
Whatever may prove to be the weaknesses of Teilhard de Chardin's work, he will always have the credit of having correctly defined the major change of our age.
“The Humanities in the Electronic Age” (1961), in McLuhan Unbound (2017), p 12
Year: 1961
Working concepts of "collective consciousness" in advertising agencies have in turn given salience and practical effectiveness to these "magical" notions of language.
Letter to Ezra Pound, January 5, 1951, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 219
Year: 1951
Our electronic world now calls for a unified global field of awareness; the kind of private consciousness appropriate to literate man can be viewed as an unbearable kink in the collective consciousness demanded by electronic information movement.
“The Agenbite of Outwit”, In Location Magazine, Vol.1, No.1, (1963), reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research: Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 125
Year: 1963
In approaching the structure of Ulysses as a newspaper landscape it is well to call to mind a favorite book of Joyce’s, The Purple Island of Phineas Fletcher. The author’s name suggesting Finn the arrow-maker. Fletcher presents the anatomy and labyrinths of the human body in terms of an enchanted Spenserian landscape. Many have pointed out the importance of the human form of the sleeping giant, the collective consciousness, as the structure of the Wake. And Joyce was careful to instruct his readers in the relation between the episode of Ulysses and our bodily organs. (In 1844 the American press greeted the telegraph as “the first definite pulsation of the real nervous system of the world.”)
"Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press", in The Sewanee Review, Vol.62, No.1, Jan-March (1954), p 50, reprinted in The Interior Landscape The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), p .16
Year: 1954
Chapter:
Ignorance
To create an antienvironment for such electric technology would seem to require a technological extension of both private and corporate consciousness. The awareness and opposition of the individual are in these circumstances as irrelevant as they are futile.
“The Emperor’s New Clothes,” 1966, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1997, UK edition), 334
Year: 1966
[Someday we may see] …a kind of computerized ESP, with consciousness as the corporate content of the environment – and eventually, maybe even a small portable computer, about the size of a hearing aid, that would process our private experience through the corporate experience, the way dreams do now.
From a lecture at Spencer Memorial Church in NYC in spring of 1965, reported in “The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, May 15, 1965, p 44
Year: 1965
Chapters:
After Language | Computer | Extending Consciousness | From Tribal to Literate | Occult | Predictions | Present [The]
Our electronic world now calls for a unified global field of awareness; the kind of private consciousness appropriate to literate man can be viewed as an unbearable kink in the collective conscioiusness demanded by electronic information movement.
“The Agennbite of Outwit,” Location magazine, Vol 1, Number 1, 1963, reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research (19197), p 125
Year: 1963
The figures of classical rhetoric are archetypes or postures of individual minds. Joyce by means of the modern press translates them into archetypes or postures of collective consciousness. He breaks open the closed system of classical rhetoric at the same time that he cuts into the closed system of newspaper somnambulism.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 267
Year: 1962
Language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this technical extension of consciousness that is speech.
Understanding Media, 1964, Gingko Critical Edition, p 74
Year: 1964
The corporate icon is the most involving of effects because it is made up of public attitudes.
“Guaranteed Income in the Electric Age”, 1966
Year: 1966