A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Extending Consciousness (30 quotes)
There is nothing inherently impossible in the computer, or that type of technology, extending consciousness itself as a universal environment.
“Electric Consciousness and the Church” (1970), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 168
Year: 1970
Chapters:
Next Medium [The] | Propaganda
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:
Corporate Consciousness
Any process that approaches instant interrelation of a total field tends to raise itself to the level of conscious awareness, so that computers seem to " think." In fact, they are highly specialized at present, and quite lacking in the full process of interrelation that makes for consciousness. Obviously, they can be made to simulate the process of consciousness, just as our electric global networks now begin to simulate the condition of our central nervous system. But a conscious computer would still be one that was an extension of our consciousness, as a telescope is an extension of our eyes, or as a ventriloquist's dummy is an extension of the ventriloquist.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 351
Year: 1964
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
“Innovation Is Obsolete”, in Evergreen Review, Vol. 15, No. 90, June (1971), p 48
Year: 1971
In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness. That is what is meant when we say that we daily know more and more about man. We mean that we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression that exceed ourselves. Man is a form of expression who is traditionally expected to repeat himself and to echo the praise of his Creator. "Prayer," said George Herbert, "is reversed thunder. " Man has the power to reverberate the Divine thunder, by verbal translation.
Understanding Media 1964, MIT/Routledge, 57
Year: 1964
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 next phase of this extension will naturally concern the action of making consciousness technologically.
“The Emperor’s Old Clothes” , (1966), reprinted in McLuhan Unbound #20 (2017), p 11
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Propaganda
Drawn to McLuhan #7
Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. A ratio of interplay among these extensions of our human functions is now as necessary collectively as it has always been for our private and personal rationality in terms of our private senses or "wits," as they were once called.
“Prologue”, in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 5
Year: 1962
Chapter:
Ignorance
The culturally depraved, or deprived, can now join hands in a daisy-ring of electronic circuitry. Henceforth we shall see all of both the most elevated and degraded features of man simultaneously enlarged to as least planetary scale. Man-as-'Cyborg' can exploit the possibility either of total extension of his consciousness as a world environment or as a perpetual and collective organism of war.
“Inflation as New Rim-Spin,” The McLuhan DEW-LINE Newsletter, Vol. 2, No. 1, September, 1969
Year: 1969
The Greeks had the notion of a consensus or a faculty of “common sense” that translated each sense into each other sense, and conferred consciousness on man. Today, when we have extended all part of our bodies and senses by technology, we are haunted by the need for outer consensus of technology and experience that would raise our communal lives to the level of a world-wide consensus.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 108
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Senses
Electricity points the way to an extension of the process of consciousness itself, on a world scale, and without any verbalization whatever… 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.
Understanding Media, 1964, in the MIT/Routledge edition, p 80
Year: 1964
[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 Q and A following 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 | Corporate Consciousness | From Tribal to Literate | Occult | Predictions | Present [The]
Having extended or translated our central nervous system into the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well. Then, at least, we shall be able to program consciousness in such wise that it cannot be numbed nor distracted by the Narcissus illusions of the entertainment world that beset mankind when he encounters himself extended in his own gimmickry.
UM MIT pp 60-61
Chapter:
Computer
This extension of consciousness has already begun with the computer and has been anticipated in our obsession with ESP and occult awareness.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 14
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Computer | Oft-Cited Quotes
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge, p 61
Year: 1964
They [pop culture icons] exist not so much in themselves but as types of collective life felt and perceived through a mass medium. L'il Abner, Bob Hope, Donald Duck, and Marilyn Monroe become points of collective awareness and communication for an entire society. And as technology increasingly undertakes to submit the entire planet as well as the contents of consciousness to the purposes of man's factive intelligence it behooves us to consider the whole process of magical transformation involved in the media acutely and extensively.
“Sight, Sound and the Fury” The Commonweal (1954), p 9
Year: 1954
Chapters:
Celebrity and Fame | Media Study
Poe and Dickens, however, made their move not at the privileged level of the art consciousness of a capital such as Paris. They already lived in the new conditions of collective consciousness from which the sharp individual articulation of awareness had disappeared or in which it was insignificant. London assumed this character by 1780. America was, as a continent, in this state from the same period.
“Space, Time and Poetry” (1956), in McLuhan Unbound (2017), p 13
Year: 1956
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 | Corporate Consciousness | Ecology | Present [The]
With increased speed of obtaining and handling data comes the need for integral awareness on a corporate scale.
Letter to Ernest Sirluck, December 2, 1963, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 293
Year: 1963
Is not this the problem that we have now to face in the management of inner and outer space, not fixed but ever new-made ratios, shifting always to maintain a maximal focal point of consciousness. Thus the human community would assume the same integral freedom and awareness as the private person?”
Letter to Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, December 23, 1960, in Letters (1987) p 278
Year: 1960
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?”
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge, p 61
Year: 1964
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
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 | Corporate Consciousness | Future | Mastering Technology | Predictions
We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 24
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Global Village | Retribalizing
The changes in function of social relationships that go with not only the speed‐up of information in the world but in the sheer quantity of information and the sheer intimacy of our new interrelatedness has transformed society into a kind of “skin flick”. Everybody is inside everybody's skin.
“Mr. Nixon and the Dropout Strategy”, in The New York Times, July 29, 1973, Section E, Page 13
Year: 1973
MANSARAM - Well sir, you know about this East/West Happening?
MCLUHAN - Oh, yeah! Well, the simple fact of the matter is the whole world is an East/West happening, and while the Western world is going Oriental, the Oriental world is going Western. This has been going on for a century, and so what could be a bigger East/West happening than that? See, all the Western artists have gone Oriental since Baudelaire, and all the painters, all abstract art is Oriental art.
A long- unpublished interview done in1967 by Artist P. Mansaram, much later published in the McLuhan Galaxy Blog (2014) by Alex Kuskis.
Year: 1967
... And the sheer intimacy of our new interrelatedness has, as it were, transformed society into a kind of “skin-flick,” in which everybody is inside everybody’s skin.
“Mr. Nixon and the Dropout Strategy”, in The New York Times, July 29, 1973, Section E, Page 13
Year: 1973
Chapters:
Global Village | Retribalizing
…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” in Mass Media in Canada, Ed., John A. Irving (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1962), p 200
Year: 1962
Chapters:
Corporate Consciousness | Giedion, Sigfried | Global Village | Mastering Technology | Predictions
To live in an age where global intercommunication is the very format of the most popular press and magazines is to experience that simultaneous awareness of many cultures and many ages which used to be the mark of the very few.
“An Historical Approach to the Media of Communication.” Excerpts from a talk given July 26, 1955, at Teachers College, Columbia University. In Communication Lines (Columbia), August,1955, p 200
Year: 1955
Chapter:
Global Village
Whenever any new medium or extension occurs, it creates a new myth for itself, usually associated with a major figure: Aretino, the Scourge of Princes and the Puppet of Printing; Napoleon and the trauma of industrial change; Chaplin, the public conscience of the movie; Hitler, the tribal totem of radio; and Floriene Nightengale, the first singer of human woe by telegraph wire.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 252
Year: 1964
Chapter:
LOM 1 - Enhance or Amplify