A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Hunters of Information (10 quotes)
The electric information environment returns all men to the condition of the hunter.
Marshall McLuhan
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 42
Quote #2791
Year: 1970
Chapter: Hunters of Information
In the age of the information hunter, feed-back yields to feedforward, the point of view becomes the probe. Problems become discoveries.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 80
Quote #2792
Year: 1970
Chapter: Problem Solving
The new information environment is, in the highest degree, the scene of the hunter. It is the scene of perpetual warfare and it now surrounds every man. Both the need for military and commercial information has led in the last decade to innovations of electric service that have crossed all private and national boundaries alike.
“Mr. Nixon and the Dropout Strategy” (1973), typescript, p 1
Quote #2793
Year: 1973
Chapters: Chiasmus, Flips, Reversals | Divided by Media | Information
Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.
“The Agenbite of Outwit”, In Location Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1963), p 121, reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research: Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 125
In the age of the information hunter, feed-back yields to feedforward, the point of view becomes the probe. Problems become discoveries.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 80
Quote #2794
Year: 1970
We have become like the most primitive paleolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.
“The Agenbite of Outwit”, 1963, reprinted in Media Research: Technology, Art, Communication, 1997, p. 124
Quote #2795
Year: 1963
Chapter: Information
The hunter is back–the old planter with his little subdivisions, specialisms, basket-weaving, strip culture—is out. The hunter is back. The hunter is the man who does not work on little strips of culture but plays the total field. That’s the world of James Bond. That’s the world of the electronic total information environment.
“What the New Communications Will Mean to Public Relations,” Public Relations Journal, January, 1967, p 23
Quote #2796
Year: 1967
Chapter: Information Overload
Every one of us is now living in a time of overload. Everywhere we turn is information, packaged, and/or just broadcast, pouring all over you, all the time. And so, in this environment, you desperately need pattern recognition, which is hunting. Give me the clue. Clue me in, quick.
The Inside Exchange, 1977, p 3 of photo copy
Quote #2797
Year: 1977
Chapter: Information Overload
[Of the photograph] By its snapshotting quality it enhances aggression and private power over people. It obsolesces privacy. retrieves the past as present; it brings back the big-game hunter.
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 287
Quote #2798
Year: 1979
Chapter: Laws of Media

Drawn to McLuhan #9

Vintage-style cartoon illustration of a wild-eyed man in a red suit and hat running off the edge of a cliff while reading an open book and swinging a butterfly net at a monarch butterfly just out of reach.
“The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.”
Photograph of a museum gallery where two visitors view a large grid of nine framed screens/photographs depicting a lush green forest, arranged edge-to-edge on a white wall.
“The new media are not bridges between man and nature, they are nature.”
Illustrated cartoon of a man in a suit trapped and falling through the neck of a giant hourglass, being funneled through a glowing smartphone into a stream of binary code below, set against an aged newspaper-page background.
“The more that is recorded about each one of us in the data banks, the less we exist.”
Illustrated drawing of an anxious-looking woman biting a pencil while standing in a voting booth with curtains, other voters visible blurred in the background.
“The ballot box, for example, is the product of literate Western culture—a hot box in a cool world—and thus obsolescent. The tribal will is consensually expressed through the simultaneous interplay of all members of a community that is deeply interrelated and involved, and would thus consider the casting of a ‘private’ ballot in a shrouded polling booth a ludicrous anachronism.”
Weathered street-art photograph of three life-size paper cutout figures pasted on a green wooden wall, each wearing everyday clothing but with a motor-scooter front end/headlight in place of a head.
“People really do think of themselves as specialized machines nowadays. ‘That’s just my speed’ is a most revealing remark.”
Illustrated cartoon of a man sitting hunched before a panel of stern, seated academics at a curved tribunal table in a book-lined hall, with one panelist pointing accusingly as a large speech-bubble text looms overhead.
[In a 1976 letter to a student friend] “In passing, you mention that the moment of judgment would be a judgment by one's peers. This is indeed a terrifying thought.”
Illustrated cartoon of an army of angry, weapon-wielding question-mark characters storming a castle with ladders and axes, while a line of academics in caps and gowns holding open books stands defending the wall.
“Knowledge is a bigger obstacle to problem-solving than ignorance.”
Split illustration showing a man livestreaming from a home office on one side, connected across a globe by a glowing arc to a group of friends watching him on a laptop at an outdoor Paris cafe with the Eiffel Tower visible on the other side.
“If you are moving at the speed of light, you are already there.”
Illustrated comic panel of an older man in a brown tweed jacket and glasses (Marshall McLuhan) gesturing while speaking to a bearded interviewer holding a notebook and tape recorder, seated in a book-lined study with a globe nearby.
“I have nothing but distaste for the process of change. Given the choice? I would have preferred to live in the thirteenth century.”
Illustrated cartoon of Marshall McLuhan in a suit, surfing on a board reading "The Medium Is the Message" atop a giant wave made of books, ancient Greek philosophers, and 20th-century pop-culture icons (Charlie Brown, Superman, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, the Beatles) surging around him.
“Control over change would seem to consist in moving with it but ahead of it.”
The impossibility of secrecy under electronic conditions makes espionage and man-hunting the principal activity of our time.
“X-Ray Vision,” contribution to a Macleans forum, January, 1974
Quote #2799
Year: 1974
Chapter: McLuhanisms & Zingers
The police state is now a work of art, a bureaucratic ballet of undulated 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, p 26
Quote #2800
Year: 1972
Chapters: McLuhanisms & Zingers | Surveillance
Information Hunt Looms Big
Title of a 1967 essay
Quote #2801
Year: 1967
© The Estate of Marshall McLuhan