A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Hardware / Software (52 quotes)
The sociological approach to the human environment began with Sputnik in 1957. So far, society has meant hardware, and supplies, and quantification of things and people. Now the time is ripe to scan the software environment, the planetary surround of electric information and its effects on the diverse populations of the globe.
“When the West Goes East and the East Goes West,” unpublished one page typescript dated January 6, 1977.
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Planet, Nature
Nineteenth century hardware is now receding into insignificance. This means the end of the old division between work and residence.
Letter to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, April 14, 1969, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 366
Year: 1969
The field of 'information theory' began by using the old hardware paradigm of transportation of data from point to point.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 111.
Year: 1988
Chapter:
Information
Again, as the economy moves more and more into the electrical orbit of programmed information, production is oriented increasingly toward service. Hardware becomes software. This process appears sufficiently in the world of advertising. As the means of advertising have greatly enlarged, the images created by advertising become an ever larger portion of the needs and satisfactions of the public.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 201
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Predictions
As we seem to be acquiring the Eastern “software”, the Orient would seem to be taking over our Western hardware along with our Western alphabet. What has been formed is a completely new “ball park” of global dimensions with completely unfamiliar ground rules. In any event the printed and written word will have a salient function.
Speech delivered in Denver, May 4, (1975), transcript, p 3
Year: 1975
Chapter:
West and East
Half the world today is engaged in keeping the other half "under surveillance". This, in fact, is the hang-up of the age of "software" and information. In the preceding "hardware" age the "haves" of the world had kept the "have-nots" under "surveillance". This old beat for flatfoots has now been relegated to the world of popular entertainment. The police state is now a work of art, a bureaucratic ballet of undulating sirens. That is a way of saying that the espionage activities of our multitudinous man hunters and "crediting" agencies are not only archaic, but redundant and irrelevant.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, pages 25-26
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Sports and Games
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 repetition 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
Drawn to McLuhan #6
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 technique 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 | From Tribal to Literate | Time | Today’s Transition | Warnings
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
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:
From Tribal to Literate | 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 primiives 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 free 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:
From Tribal to Literate | 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 items of news and advertising that exist under a newspaper dateline are interrelated only by that dateline. They have no interconnection of logic or statement. Yet they form a mosaic or corporate image whose parts are interpenetrating.
“The Agenbite of Outwit”, In Location Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1963), reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research: Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 123
Year: 1963
Chapters:
Interval | Today’s Transition
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:
From Tribal to Literate | 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 pre-computer 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:
From Tribal to Literate | 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:
From Tribal to Literate | 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:
From Tribal to Literate | 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
MIKE McMANUS: You say, too, that between today's child who has been raised electronically — and who must still live in a literate world, because we are still in a literate world — that there's a 2400-year gap between that boy or girl and his parents...
McLUHAN: And his parents, who grew up in a literate society. Well, the alphabet, the phonetic alphabet, the beginnings of western literacy, came in about 500 B.C. And since then, between then and now is approximately 2400 or 2500 years. And we are the first post-literate generation, as it were. We have by-passed the literate world of hardware and the lineal left hemisphere technology. We have by-passed it by moving once more, again, into the altogether world, the holistic world, of the right hemisphere people, who are the third-world people. So what is happening to our own children is we're watching them become third-world.
“Mike McManus TVO interview”, 1977, transcript 9:28
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
McMANUS: Now, these children that are more groupy and less private, are they also more passionate or more violent?
McLUHAN: I think that the sheer dislocation of their lives has put them through a very violent course, indeed. They have been ripped off.
McMANUS: But they're kind of rudderless.
McLUHAN: They don't have goals. Because, at the speed of light, what is a goal? You're already there. You name it, and you're there.
“Mike McManus TVO interview”, 1977, transcript 11:03
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
The paradox today is that the ground of the latest Western technologies is electronic and simultaneous, and thus structurally right-hemisphere and "Oriental" and oral in its nature and effects. This situation began with the telegraph more than a century ago. Still, the overwhelming pattern of procedures in the Western world remains lineal, sequential, and connected in political and legal institutions, and also in education and commerce, but not in entertainment or art. A formula for complete chaos!
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 80
Year: 1988
Chapters:
Goodbye Linearity | Hemispheres of the Brain | Retribalizing | Today’s Transition | Warnings
…we live in an electric simultaneous world, where most of the relationships between men are now invisible.
"Televised interview by Father Patrick Peyton”, on the program, Father Peyton’s Family Theatre (1972), Transcript, p 2
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Media Effects | Today’s Transition
Meantime, in both new attire and new dwellings, our unified sensibility cavorts amidst a wide range of awareness of materials and colors which makes ours one of the greatest ages of music, poetry, painting, and architecture alike.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 122
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
Contemporary awareness had to become integral and inclusive again, after centuries of dissociated sensibilities.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 250
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
With a parallel increase of accessibility of all cultures to all cultures and of all subject matters to all others, the redesigning of the educational establishments of the Western world is equally urgent not as an ideal but as a necessity.
“Popular / Mass culture” (1960), in Understanding Me (2003), p 19
Year: 1960
Chapters:
Education | Today’s Transition
Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of 'time' and 'space' and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 16
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Change | Today’s Transition
Until recently our institutions and arrangements, social, political, and economic, had shared a one-way pattern. We still think of it as "explosive," or expansive; and though it no longer obtains, we still talk about the population explosion and the explosion in learning. In fact, it is not the increase of numbers in the world that creates our concern with population. Rather, it is the fact that everybody in the world has to live in the utmost proximity created by our electric involvement in one another's lives. In education, likewise, it is not the increase in numbers of those seeking to learn that creates the crisis. Our new concern with education follows upon the changeover to an interrelation in knowledge, where before the separate subjects of the curriculum had stood apart from each other. Departmental sovereignties have melted away as rapidly as national sovereignties under conditions of electric speed.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, pp 35-36
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Education | Today’s Transition
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, pp 3-4
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories—for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.
The Medium is the Massage (1967), p 10
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Probe | Today’s Transition