A dictionary of Marshall McLuhanβs quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
Β©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Medium is the Message (19 quotes)
The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 8
Year: 1964
[βThe Medium is the messageβ] might be illustrated by saying that the English language is an enormous medium that is very much more potent and effective than anything that is ever said in English, but anybody who uses that medium invokes or resonates the totality of it even with the most trivial remark.
βElectric Consciousness and the Churchβ (1970), in MM: The Man and His Message (1989), p 159; also in The Medium and the Light, (1999), p 79
Year: 1970
Chapter:
English Language
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 (found in Media section & Medium is the message section)
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Media
The medium is the message. As an old ground is displaced by the content of the new situation, it becomes available to ordinary attention as figure. At the same time a new nostalgia is born. The business of the artist has been to report on the nature of ground by exploring the forms of sensibility made available by each new ground, or mode of culture, long before the average man suspects that anything has changed.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 6
Year: 1968
Why should writing weaken the human memory? Pre-literate man, amazed at the efforts of the white man to write down his thoughts and sayings, asks: "Why do you write; can you not remember?"
McLuhan Hot and Cool, 1967, page 154
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Wake Them Up!
When I say βthe medium is the message,β I am using the insight of Harold Innis in The Bias of Communication. What is implied in this phrase is that the medium consists of all the services invoked or provoked by any innovation. When the Chinese shifted their writing from bamboo to paper, they developed new centralized political forms. For literate and visually oriented people, it is always a shock to learn that many of the dominant attitudes of their daily life have been structured by subliminal factors and the psychic effects of seemingly inert or neutral forms.
βEnglish Literature as Control Tower in Communication Study,β English Quarterly, Vol. 7, No 1, Spring, 1974, p 4
Year: 1974
The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 7
Year: 1964
Drawn to McLuhan #15
In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control , it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that , in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 7
Year: 1964
[The medium is the message] might be illustrated by saying that the English language is an enormous medium that is very much more potent and effective than anything that is ever said in English, but anybody who uses that medium invokes or resonates the totality of it even with the most trivial remark. Our own mother tongues are things in which we participate totally. They change our perception. So that if we spoke Chinese we would have a different sense of hearing, smell and touch. The same is true of printing, radio, movies and TV. They actually alter our organs of perception without our knowing it. We are never aware of these changes. It's like fish in water. Fish know nothing about water, and yet it is the only element they enjoy.
βElectric Consciousness and the Churchβ (1970), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 159
Year: 1970
General systems studies, like most media studies, ignore the rub of figure against ground and try to deduce the ground by a simple quantitative study of the figure, which is then relegated to the category of βcontent.οΏ½οΏ½οΏ½ This approach leads to hopeless confusion, since in every instance, and in the case of every medium whatever, whether of language or clothing or radio or TV, it is the user himself who is the content, and it is the user alone who constitutes the experience of that service. No matter what is on TV, if the user is a Chinese, it is going to be a Chinese program, just as surely as a movie on TV is experienced as a TV show. For the TV medium translates the movie medium into itself, rendering not a movie, but a TV image.
Contribution to On Growth by William Oltmans (1974), p 76
Year: 1974
Banker and client alike move in an increasingly abstract world of instant data, a world which tends to transform its occupants into roulette players who live in a world of anticipatory economics.
BCN 100th Annual Report, 1974
Year: 1974
In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole⦠Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 13
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Cubism | Perspective, Point of View
If one says that any new technology creates a new environment , that is better than saying the medium is the message. The content of the new environment is always the old one. The content is greatly transformed by the new technology.
Letter to Buckminster Fuller, September 17, 1964, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), pp 308-309
Year: 1964
This fact merely underlines the point that "the medium is the message" because 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
Consciousness itself is an inclusive process not at all dependent on content. Consciousness does not postulate consciousness of anything in particular.
Understanding Media (1964) MIT/ROUTLEDGE, p 283
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Consciousness
Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the βcontent,β 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
Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message.... Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field, and we can now say, 'The medium is the message', quite naturally. Before the electric speed and total field, it was not obvious that the medium is the message.
Understanding Media (1962), MIT/ROUTLEDGE, p 13
Year: 1962
βThe medium is the messageβ is a phrase that came to my mind during a conference of radio broadcasters in Vancouver in 1959. TV was threatening the radio world at the time and I wished merely to draw attention to the fact that each medium created its own public and set up a unique equilibrium in its users.
Who Was Marshall McLuhan? by Barrington Nevitt and Maurice McLuhan, 1994, p 210
Year: 1994
MCLUHAN: The movie theatre is the massage. Being inside is getting their full treatment. MISS FISHER: There seemed to be an indication that there is something coming out differently. MCLUHAN: When you get massaged you do come out quite different.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967, edited by William Buxton, U. of Alberta Press, 2026, pages 70-71
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Environment | Movies