A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Media (54 quotes)
The new media… are changing the shape of every social institution, and they compel a rapidity of recognition and adjustment which commensurate with the efficacy of the transmission of information today. In short, they make super-human demands of human nature.
“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
Yes, we must substitute an interest in the media for the previous interest in subjects. This is the logical answer to the fact that the media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if we should wish to recover that older world we can do it only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it.
“The Post-Literate Man”, 1973, Cycles 7, p 232
Year: 1973
The new art form of our time is the media themselves, not painting, not movies, not drama, but the media themselves have become the new art forms.... I write cartoons…I have wanted to write a play, for a long time, on the media . And the media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting and music and poetry, it's the media themselves.
“Jean Pare interview”, in Forces magazine a Hydro Quebec publication, No.22, (1973), p 14
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Hot & Cool
But these forms and the popular culture linked to them have no official recognition in the traditional curriculum of verbal culture.
“Space, Time and Poetry”, in Explorations 4, (1955), p 60, (2016) reprint, p 55, reprinted as McLuhan Unbound #13, (2017), p 11
Year: 1955
Avant-garde no longer exists in painting and music and poetry. It’s in the media themselves.
“Jean Pare interview”, in Forces magazine a Hydro Quebec publication, No.22, (1973), p 14
Year: 1973
Media effects are new environments as imperceptible as water to a fish, subliminal for the most part. Freud's censor is the mechanism by which in sensation we protect ourselves from over-stimulation. We live in the rear-view mirror.
“Counterblast 70”, p 22
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
Thus, in this century the telephone has rendered the organization chart of many big businesses quite inoperative, and the microphone has introduced effects into the liturgy which nobody had expected or planned.
“Liturgy and the Microphone”, (1974), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 115
Year: 1974
New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 229
Year: 1988
All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new form.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 57
Year: 1964
All media are extensions of some human faculty -- psychic or physical.
The Medium is The Massage (1967), p 26
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Extension Theory
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 199
Year: 1964
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 8
[T]he media have swallowed the older world. Even if we should wish to recover that older world we can do so only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it.
Counterblast (1969), p 135
Year: 1969
All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.
The Medium Is the Massage, 1967, p 26
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Media as Form
If the student of media will but meditate on the power of this medium of electric light to transform every structure of time and space and work and society that it penetrates or contacts, he will have the key to the form of the power that is in all media to reshape any lives that they touch. Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the "content" of the other, obscuring the operation of both.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 52
Year: 1964
These external extensions of sense… that we call media we use as constantly as we do our eyes and ears naked, and from the same motives… the book-oriented man considers this nonstop use of media as debased.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 211
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Media Effects
Let us keep in mind that the new reality is in the image and not behind it.
“The Electronic Age – the Age of Implosion” (1966), p 196
Year: 1966
Chapters:
Image | McLuhanisms & Zingers
The new media are not ways of relating us to the old “real” world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.
Counterblast (1969), p 52
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Media Effects
The understanding of media as art forms is achieved by translation of one medium into another.
Mass Media Hypotheses, 1960
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Media Effects
Mr. Wallace, If I turn off this microphone my relationship to you is changed instantly.
Diebold transcript of a conversation with Mike Wallace, 1966, p 15
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Media as Form
Without our having any ideas about them whatever, [the media] still deeply affect our idea of past and present, of ourselves, and of our relations to others.
“A Historical Approach to the Media” (1955), p 110
Year: 1955
Chapter:
Media Effects
All media work us over completely. They are so persuasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical.
The Medium is the Massage (1967), p. 26
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Media as Form
New media are to the world of man-made artifacts what new species are to biology, i.e. they are probes, thrusters into the unexplored dimensions of our world. When the man-made satellite environment was put around the earth, nature in the familiar sense ended. The earth became the content of an information environment and ceased to be the environment of social man. In evolutionary terms, technology has taken over from biology.
Dedication for Magnovia II, February, 1968
Year: 1968
Chapter:
Evolution
All media of communication begin as links or bridges between people and things and end as substitutes for those things which they had originally established new contact.
“The People of the Book” (1959), unpublished handwritten essay
Year: 1959
Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.
The Care and Feeding of Communication Innovation, Dinner Address to Conference on 8 mm Sound Film and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, 8 November 1961, published version, p 4
Year: 1961
Perhaps the effect [of media] is for the media to substitute for reality just in the degree to which they become virtuousos of realistic detail.
Counterblast (1969), p 125
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Image
People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.
From a speech he gave, later quoted by Tom Wolfe in “What If He Is Right?” in The Pump House Gang (1968)
Year: 1968
Chapters:
McLuhanisms & Zingers | News
Camp is popular because it gives people a sense of reality to see a replay of their lives.
“An informal interview with Marshall McLuhan “, by Linda Sandler, In Miss Chateleine, Fall Fashion Issue, (1974), p 90
Year: 1974
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways. The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media.
The Medium is the Massage (1967), p 8
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Medium is the Message
Yes, we must substitute an interest in the media for the previous interest in subjects. This is the logical answer to the fact that the media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if we should wish to recover that older world we can do it only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it. And no matter how many walls have fallen, the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen for is it likely to fall. For it is not accessible to the mass media.
Counterblast, 1969, p 135
Year: 1969
The new media are not ways of relating us to the old "real" world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.
Counterblast (1969), p 52
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Media Effects
It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 9
Year: 1964
…the news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.
“A Last Look at the Tube” (1978), typescript, p 3
Year: 1978
Chapter:
News
But these new forms of communication have not merely extended or accelerated our means of communicating with one another. They have utterly changed the character and meaning of what we have to say to one another.
“The Newspaper,” undated, unpublished typescript, p 5
To say that any technology or extension of man creates a new environment is a much better way of saying the medium is the message.
Letter to Edward T. Hall, September 16, 1964
Year: 1964
Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 71
If the medium is the message, the user is the content.
Letter to The Listener (August 11, 1971), in in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 305
Year: 1971
The user is the content of any situation, whether its driving a car, or wearing clothes or watching a show. The user is content.
Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder, NBC, September 6, 1976
Year: 1976
With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is “sent.”
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 223
Year: 1972
Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the “content,” which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge, p. 305
Year: 1964
The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.
"Roles, Masks, and Performances", in New Literary History, Vol. 2, No. 3, Performances in Drama, the Arts, and Society (Spring, 1971), p 520
Year: 1971
It enables me to see that the user of the electric light, or a hammer, or a language, or a book, is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.
Letter to Edward T. Hall (January 21, 1971), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 422
Year: 1971
Chapters:
Tools We Shape, Reshape Us | User as Content
The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 8
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Media Effects
All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
The Medium Is the Massage with Quentin Fiore (1967), p 26
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Media as Form
All media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical
The Medium Is the Massage with Quentin Fiore (1967), p 26
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Extension Theory
Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception.
The Medium Is the Massage with Quentin Fiore (1967), p 41
Year: 1967
Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception.
The Medium Is the Massage with Quentin Fiore (1967), p 68
Year: 1967
…everything we observe about the media points in the direction of tribal man, and away from individual man.
“Marshall McLuhan Describes The Global Village”, TV interview, May 18, 1960, transcript 04:03,
Year: 1960
Any technological innovation in any culture whatever at once changes all sensory ratios.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, 1989, p 136
Year: 1989
New technology inevitably creates new environments that act incessantly on the sensorium.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, 1989, p 136
Year: 1989
The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 18
Year: 1964
Media are artificial extensions of sensory existence. each an externalized species of the inner genus sensation
Counterblast 1969, p 116
Year: 1969
It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 46
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Tools We Shape, Reshape Us
The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will. New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.
“New Media and the Arts,” in Arts in Society, Volume 3, 1964, p 240
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Media Effects
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 199
Year: 1964
For each of the media is also a powerful weapon with which to clobber other media and other groups.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, pp 20-21
Year: 1964