A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
Your search term is From Tribal to Literate. Scroll down for the results!
🔍 Search Within Selection
From Tribal to Literate is being viewed as a chapter. Search for all appearances
Viewing chapter From Tribal to Literate (58 quotes)
Of all the great hybrid unions that breed furious release of energy and change, there is none to surpass the meeting of literate and oral cultures. The giving of man of an eye for an ear by phonetic literacy is, socially and politically, probably the most radical explosion that can occur in any social structure. This explosion of the eye, frequently repeated in “backward areas", we call Westernization. With literature now about to hybridize the cultures of the Chinese, the Indians, and the Africans, we are about to experience such a release of human power and aggressive violence as makes the previous history of phonetic alphabet technology seem quite tame.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, pp 49-50
Year: 1964
The translation of auditory into visual terms set up an inner life in man which separated him from the external world and, in part, from his own senses, as we know from the study of pre-literate societies.
“The Later Innis" Queen's Quarterly, Vol. 60, No 3, Autumn (1953), p 387, reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 41
Year: 1953
Many centuries of ideogrammic use have not threatened the seamless web of family and tribal subtleties of Chinese society. On the other hand, a single generation of alphabetic literacy suffices in Africa today, as in Gaul two thousand years ago, to release the individual initially, at least, from the tribal web.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, pages 83-84
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Language
The transformation to visual space from acoustic space occurred in ancient Greece. What took several thousand years to complete has taken several decades to reverse; the West now bathes in the emotions of postliteracy.
Laws of Media with Eric McLuhan (1988), p 4
Year: 1988
Horizontal man, prehistoric man, in this view, was innocent of "mine" and "thine." He was without individual self-consciousness.
“The God-Making Machines of the Modern World” (1954), in The Medium and the Light, 1999, p 199
Year: 1954
Chapter:
Tribal Societies
The very word idea is indicative of the revolution in thinking that took place with literacy. This word, which is not to be found in Homeric Greek, derived from the word eidos, indicating “visual image.” The alphabet had the mysterious and unique power of separating the visual faculty from the other senses and giving dominant play to the visual.
“The Alphabet, Mother of Invention” with Robert K. Logan, in Et Cetera, 1977, p 377
Year: 1977
…tribal peoples… [are] those whose entire social existence is an extension of family life….
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 300
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Tribal Societies
"Civilization" must now be used technically to mean detribalized man for whom the visual values have priority in the organization of thought and action.
The Gutenberg Galaxy : The Making of Typographic Man , (1962), p 27
Year: 1962
The clock and the alphabet, by hacking the universe into visual segments, ended the music of interrelation.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 155
Year: 1964
The book really is a means of creating a visual environment for mankind. Because native societies don't live in a visual world, they live primarily in an ear world, they don't use their eyes the way we do, and so with the coming of the forms of alphabetic writing and the book, especially with print, the whole of mankind was given an environment-or rather the literate part of mankind was given an environment that did strange things to their outlook and in look.
“IS THE BOOK DEAD?”, in The Clearing House (1968), p 447
Year: 1968
Before the invention of the phonetic alphabet, man lived in a world where all the senses were balanced and simultaneous, a closed world of tribal depth and resonance, an oral culture structured by a dominant auditory sense of life. The ear, as opposed to the cool and neutral eye, is sensitive, hyperaesthetic and all-inclusive, and contributes to the seamless web of tribal kinship and interdependence in which all members of the group existed in harmony. The primary medium of communication was speech, and thus no man knew appreciably more or less than any other--which meant that there was little individualism and specialization, the hallmarks of "civilized" Western man. Tribal cultures even today simply cannot comprehend the concept of the individual or of the separate and independent citizen. Oral cultures act and react simultaneously, whereas the capacity to act without reacting, without involvement, is the special gift of "detached" literate man. Another basic characteristic distinguishing tribal man from his literate successors is that he lived in a world of acoustic space, which gave him a radically different concept of time-space relationships.
“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 56,59, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 239-240
Year: 1969
The alphabet is a technology of visual fragmentation and specialism, and it led the Greeks quickly to the discovery of classifiable data. Havelock clarified this at length in his Preface to Plato. As long as the oral culture was not overpowered by the technological extension of the visual power in the alphabet, there was a very rich cultural result from the interplay of oral and written forms. The revival of oral culture in our own electric age now exists in a similar fecund relation with the still powerful written and visual culture. We are in our century “winding the tape backwards”. The Greeks went from oral to written even as we are moving from written to oral. They “ended” in a desert of classified data even as we could “end” in a new tribal encyclopedia of auditory incantation.
Introduction to The Bias of Communication, 1964 edition, p xi
Year: 1964
We know from our own past the kind of energy that is released, as by fission, when literacy explodes the tribal or family unit.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 50
Year: 1964
The visual world is one of matching, fragmentation and classification. The new multisensuous world is one of making in which space is not a cavity to be filled, but a possibility to be shaped.
“Environment as Programmed Happening” (1967), p 18
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Classification | Space
…the Greeks excluded the notion of zero…
“The Alphabet, Mother of Invention” with Robert K. Logan, in Et Cetera, 1977, p 380
Year: 1977
But it was by means of electricity applied to the wheel that the wheel merges once more with animal form. In fact, the wheel is now an obsolete form in the electric-missile age. But hypertrophy is the mark of obsolescence, as we shall see again and again. Just because wheel is now returning to organic form in the twentieth century it is quite easy for us to understand how primitive man “invented” it. Any creature in motion is a wheel in that repetitive form of movement has a cyclic and circular principle in it. Thus the melodies of literate societies are repeatable cycles.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 44
Year: 1962
As an example, the popular detective story depends on a technique of analysis and reconstruction which depends on the discontinuity of newspaper reportage. This discontinuity in turn is related to the technique of cinematic montage and also to the most successful contemporary methods of scientific analysis and to advanced techniques in historiography, archaeology, and anthropology.
“Advertising as a Magical Institution” from The Commerce Journal, Toronto, (1952), reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 21
Year: 1952
It needs to be understood that only short discontinuous shots of such a work as Joyce's are possible. Linear or continuous perspectives of analogical structures are only the result of radical distortion, and the craving for “simple explanations” is the yearning for univocity.
“James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial” Thought: Fordham University Quarterly, Vol. 28, No 1, (1953), in The Interior Landscape (1969), pp 36-37
Year: 1953
Perhaps the terrifying thing about the new media for most of us is their inevitable evocation of irrational response. The irrational has become the major dimension of experience in our world.
“Culture without Literacy”, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 126 reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 311, additional reprint in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 136, and McLuhan Unbound #6, (2017)
Year: 1953
Chapters:
Anxieties Caused By Change | Divided by Media | Hardware / Software | Time | Today’s Transition | Warnings
By surpassing writing, we have regained our WHOLENESS, not on a national or cultural, but cosmic, plane. We have evoked a super-civilized, sub-primitive man.
“Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath”, in Shenandoah The Washington And Lee University Review, Vol. VII, No. 1, Autumn (1955), p 51, reprinted in Explorations 4, (1955), p 32. Explorations in Communication: an Anthology (1960), p 208
Year: 1955
Chapters:
Postliteracy | Today’s Transition
For a century it has been evident in North America that great frustration of mind and purpose has resulted from the gap between official and unofficial education. Official institutional instruction at all levels has tried to maintain the priority of traditional verbal and written culture. Unofficial culture has been mainly non-verbal and visual. Unofficially the young have responded spontaneously and enthusiastically to the new technological environment. Their sensibilities have been shaped by the new machine forms which are themselves the product of the artistic imagination in mathematics and physics. But these forms and the popular culture linked to them have no official recognition in the traditional curriculum of verbal culture... There does exist, then, a two-way bridge between the traditional and technological worlds which are at war in Western culture. But it has been officially ignored or condemned. To travel this bridge requires of the traveler an acquaintance with the language and techniques of poetry on the one hand, and of the language and techniques of painting, architecture, and the visual world on the other. Few are prepared to acquire both languages and so the war between these worlds continues, waged witlessly in classroom.
“Space, Time and Poetry”, in Explorations 4, (1955), p 60, (2016) reprint, p 55, reprinted as McLuhan Unbound #13, (2017), p 11
Year: 1955
Today we live on the frontier between five centuries of mechanism and the new electronics, between the homogenous and the simultaneous. It is painful but fruitful.
The Gutenberg Galaxy : The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 141
Year: 1962
The antithetic electric power of instant information that reverses social explosion into implosion, private enterprise into organization man, and expanding empires into common markets, has obtained as little recognition as the written word. The power of radio to retribalize mankind, its almost instant reversal of individualism into collectivism, Fascist or Marxist, has gone unnoticed. So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what needs to be explained. The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain. It goes without saying that the universal ignoring of the psychic action of technology bespeaks some inherent function, some essential numbing of consciousness such as occurs under stress and shock conditions.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 304
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Advice | Between Two Ages | Electric, Electronic | Marx, Karl | Media Effects | Narcissus, Denial of Media Effects | Radio | Sleepwalkers | Today’s Transition
I think the best distinction might be found in the phrase, "with it." You know how today we speak of being with it... meaning we've understood completely, we've got the message as it were....in every way possible. But in the older book or print culture people weren't with it....they were away from it....by themselves with their own private point of view. You have no point of view when you're with it...because you accept a thing totally. And we're with it because these new media of ours....the ones you talked about in the appliance store....have made our world into a single unit....the world is now like a continually sounding tribal drum, where everybody gets the message....all the time. A princess gets married in England and boom boom boon go the drums and we all hear about it; an earthquake in North Africa, a Hollywood star gets drunk....away go the drums again. I use the word tribal...probably the key word.
The Teenager and The Media, Explorations for CBC May 18th, (1960) Printed as Exhibit 2--Television Script, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p xxiii
Year: 1960
What could be more practical for a man caught between the Scylla of a literary culture and the Charybdis of post-literate technology to make himself a raft of ad copy?
The Gutenberg Galaxy : The Making of Typographic Man , (1962), p 77
Year: 1962
Chapters:
Hardware / Software | Today’s Transition
Ordinary human instinct causes people to recoil from the new environments and to rely on the rear-view mirror as a kind of repeat or ricorso of the preceding environments, thus insuring total disorientation at all times ... The visual space creates a kind of human identity that is extremely fragmented. To retain such an image of the self requires persistent violence, both to one's self and to others. As Joyce put it, 'Love thy label as thyself.' Labels as classification are extreme forms of visual culture.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), Preface, pp xxiii-xxiv
Year: 1968
There are many ways in which the book and literate values are threatened by the mere fact of the electric service environment.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 175
Year: 1972
The implication of discarnate, disembodied existence in an information world is one for which our educational system has not quite prepared us.
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 288
Year: 1979
The civilized man imagines that he is going to help the native by stripping off the native’s world of myth and legend, ritual and superstition. The paradox is that in the electric age we ourselves are moving into, returning to, the acoustic world of simultaneous involvement and awareness, experiencing the surfacing of the subliminal life…. We had imagined that we could simply strip off the acoustic culture of these primitives or these natives in order to civilize them, but the same stripping off of our civilization is taking place at the same time, by means of the new electric technology. We are losing our civilization even faster than we stripped off the institutions of the Indians and the Africans.
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 296
Year: 1979
What I wish to show is that today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
“An Historical Approach to the Media of Communication” (1955), speech given at Columbia University, July 26, 1955, typescript, p 2
Year: 1955
With television both sight and sound were out of the wire and our culture stepped from of mechanization for the first time since the invention of writing, 5,000 years ago.
From his 1955 Report to the Ford Foundation, quoted in W. Terrence Gordon’s Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding (1997), p 163
Year: 1955
One way of stating our condition is to say that in the electronic age our entire technology has achieved the freedom and flexibility that had formerly been available only in the verbal universe. The metaphoric parallels and discontinuities — parataxis and syntaxis — by which mankind had first learned to structure acoustic space and create a subtle world of oral and interpersonal relations is now possible visually and spatially as well.
From his 1955 Report to the Ford Foundation, quoted in W. Terrence Gordon’s Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding (1997), p 164
Year: 1955
Chapters:
Hardware / Software | Today’s Transition
For dialogue is not light on, but light through, which is the difference between film and TV.
“The New Media and the New Education,” The Basilian Teacher, December, (1961), p 97, Portions originally published as “Grammars for the Newer Media.” In Communication in General Education: College Composition and Communication, (1960)
Year: 1961
The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization and application of knowledge. 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), p 123; reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research: Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 125
Year: 1963
The dichotomy between linear and radial expression is not really as radical as might appear, but it has in such terms as "continuous": versus "discontinuous" or "statement" versus "suggestion" divided the allegiance of poets, critics, and readers from the time of Coleridge to the present. It certainly had much to do with the intellectual divergence between Coleridge and Wordsworth, between Browning and Tennyson, and between Pound and Eliot.
“Coleridge as Artist” (1957), in The Interior Landscape (1969), p 117
Year: 1957
Chapters:
Hardware / Software | Today’s Transition
Until Newton the Senecans had dominated the literary scene from Montaigne to Pascal and from Donne to Pope. Their preoccupation was with the literary techniques for arresting and projecting some phase of the human mind: to arrest in order to project, and to project in order to contemplate. Like the inventors of cinema at the beginning of this century they hit upon the technique of stylistic discontinuity as a means of arresting a moment of consciousness. The movie camera takes a thousand still shots in order to capture the aspects of a brief moment. The style coupé and the “cutting period” attempted something comparable in the essay and the poem. But to have carried this art further than Pope was probably impossible. At any rate the advent of Newton’s Optics diverted artistic effort from poetic statement to the use of external landscape as a means of projecting and controlling states of mind under the guidance of two major concepts. The first of these derived from the study of the visual harmonics of the spectrum which led to a revival of the classic images of the harps of Aeolus and Memnon. If the surfaces of matter were varied prisms for revealing the qualities of light, then the entire visible and audible world could be conceived as a species of visual music. The second concept is related to the first. For, if the external world is attuned to the mind of man then the whole of Nature is a language and the poet is a pontifex or bridge between the two worlds.
“Coleridge as Artist” (1954), in The Interior Landscape (1969), pp 119-120
Year: 1954
The old hidden ground then emerges as a new rear-view figure, for all to see. Computers are still serving mainly as agents to sustain precomputer effects.
“The Argument: Causality in the Electric World”, in Technology and Culture, Vol.14, No. 1, January (1973), p 10, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound # 3, (2005). p 18
Year: 1973
The private psyche may be an artificial monster of the most precious discovery. It is demonstrable that it had a historical origin and that this "artifact" may have a contemporary demise in this electronic age of discarnate togetherness.
Liturgy And Media" in The Critic, Vol.31, No. 3, January-February (1973), p 21, reprinted in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (1999), p 128
Year: 1973
Can all of these forms of visual experience now be by-passed by acoustic and discarnate man of the present electric world environment?
Liturgy And Media” in The Critic, Vol.31, No. 3, January-February (1973), p 23, reprinted in reprinted in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (1999), p 131
Year: 1973
Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.
“Jean Pare interview”, in Forces magazine a Hydro Quebec publication, No.22, (1973), p 8
Year: 1973
The loss of the old abstract visual space is the message of all modern arts, music, literary, plastic and architectural.
“Understanding McLuhan—and fie on any who don’t.” in The Globe and Mail, September 10th, p. 7 (full p. with picture). Response to “Misunderstanding McLuhan” by Richard Schickel in The Globe and Mail, Friday, August 31st, 1973
Year: 1973
Chapters:
Hardware / Software | Today’s Transition
The pursuit of “objectives” has been [Western civilized man’s] aim against all obstacles: the Western dream of conquest, one-upsmanship…With electricity, when we found the old kind of conquest too simple, we suddenly realized that it wasn’t a challenging goal after all. Now, when we can press a button and blow up the whole world, we realize that goals aren’t really compatible with community… So now we’re beginning to ask, but what’s the quality of life that goes with this easy conquest? What sort of human satisfactions are we developing in these conditions of endless rivalry? What sort of people do we want to be?
“Technology and the Human Dimension”: Interview with Louis Forsdale (1974), in Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message (1989), p 19
Year: 1974
Chapters:
Hardware / Software | Today’s Transition
And, while your voice is there, you and the people you speak to are here, at the same time. Electric man has no bodily being, he is literally discarnate. But a discarnate world, like the one we now live in, is a tremendous menace to an incarnate Church, and its theologians haven't even deemed it worthwhile to examine the fact.
“Keys to the Electronic Revolution”, Conversation with Pierre Babin (1977), in The Medium And The Light (1999), p 50
Year: 1977
When you are on the air you are, in a way, everywhere at once. Electric man is a "super angel." When you are on the telephone you have no body.
“Keys to the Electronic Revolution” Pierre Babin interview (1977), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 50
Year: 1977
The sender goes on the air and is instantaneously everywhere without a body. Electricity creates the angelic or discarnate being of electronic man, who has no body.
“Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 288
Year: 1979
We have been through the three stages of alarm, resistance, and exhaustion that occur in every disease or stress of life, whether individual or collective. At least, our exhausted slump after the first encounter with the electric has inclined us to expect new problems. However, backward countries that have experienced little permeation with our own mechanical and specialist culture are much better able to confront and to understand electric technology. Not only have backward and nonindustrial cultures no specialist habits to overcome in their encounter with electromagnetism, but they have still much of their traditional oral culture that has the total, unified "field" character of our new electromagnetism. Our old industrialized areas, having eroded their oral traditions automatically, are in the position of having to rediscover them in order to cope with the electric age.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, pp 26-27
Year: 1964
When the globe becomes a single electronic computer, with all its languages and cultures recorded on a single tribal drum, the fixed point of view of print culture becomes irrelevant and impossible, no matter how precious.
Letter to David Riesman, February 18th, 1960, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 261
Year: 1960
Chapters:
Hardware / Software | Today’s Transition
The hidden ground of the entire development [today] is the new speed of information movement, for it is this movement at the speed of light which not only transforms our image of ourselves but involves us in the lives of others in a completely new way.
Letter to Franklin R. Gannon, June 12, 1973, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 477
Year: 1973
Today the great principle of classical physics and economics and political science, namely that of the divisibility of each process, has reversed itself by sheer extension into the unified field theory; and automation in industry replaces the divisibility of process with the organic interlacing of all functions in the complex. The electric tape succeeds the assembly line.
“Reversal of the Overheated Medium,” in The Essential McLuhan (1995), p 169
Year: 1995
Organic interdependence means that disruption of any part of the organism can prove fatal to the whole. Every industry has had to "rethink through" (the awkwardness of this phrase betrays the painfulness of the process), function by function, its place in the economy. But automation forces not only industry and town planners, but government and even education, to come into some relation to social facts.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 353
Year: 1964
Only Graeco-Roman man has ever had this visual faculty in isolation, and today it is threatened, not by any single factors such as television or radio, but by the electric speed of information movement in general. Electric speed is approximately the speed of light, and this constitutes an information environment that has basically an acoustic structure. At the speed of light, information is simultaneous from all directions and this is the structure of the act of hearing. i. e. the message or effect of direct information is acoustic, even when it is read in a newspaper with a mosaic of world-wide items under a single date-line.
Letter to Barbara Ward, February 9, 1973”, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 466
Year: 1973
This is where William Burroughs comes in with his Naked Lunch. When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals.
“The Hot and Cool Interview”, in Media Research (1997), p 67
Year: 1997
What Polanyi observes about the insentience of those involved in the expediting of the new machine industry is typical of all the local and contemporary attitudes to revolution. It is felt, at those times, that the future will be a larger or greatly improved version of the immediate past.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 272
Year: 1962
Chapter:
Future
Man in the future will not work—automation will work for him—but he may be totally involved as a painter is, or as a thinker is, or as a poet is. Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or at leisure.
““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
Now that is not easy to explain nor to prescribe for. I have touched upon the future of language, the future of consciousness, the future of the city, the future, perhaps finally, of work.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 167
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Future
[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 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 | Corporate Consciousness | Extending Consciousness | Occult | Predictions | Present [The]
The older forms of life on this planet might also be replaced by new forms that would accord with our own instructions. By the same means we might program DNA particles so that they would reproduce dinosaurs and other vanishes species of creatures. In short, what we take for granted in a Hollywood movie, that recreates vanished cities and civilizations, may soon be extended from the world of illusion and fantasy to the everyday world.
“New Journey for the Magi” (1965), p 2
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Future