A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
Your search term is Specialism. Scroll down for the results!
🔍 Search Within Selection
Specialism is being viewed as a chapter. Search for all appearances
Viewing chapter Specialism (21 quotes)
" Come into my parlor," said the computer to the specialist. Anybody who wants to be taken over by a computer should just specialize.
“The Medium Is the Massage”, (1966), p, 20; reprinted in Understanding Me (2002), p 80
Year: 1966
Chapters:
Computer | McLuhanisms & Zingers
The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The "expert" is the man who stays put.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 93
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Environment
Just because all the king’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again, it doesn’t follow that electromagnetic automation couldn’t have put Humpty Dumpty back together. The integral and unified egg had no business sitting on a wall, anyway. Walls are made of uniformly fragmented bricks that arise with specialisms and bureaucracies. They are the deadly enemies of integral beings like eggs. Humpty Dumpty met the challenge of the wall with a spectacular collapse.
“Humpty Dumpty, Automation, and TV” [University of Toronto] Varsity Graduate, Volume 10, Number 4, Summer, 1963, p 25
Year: 1963
Chapters:
Goodbye Linearity | McLuhanisms & Zingers
This strange gap between the specialist, visual world and the integral, auditory world needs to be better understood today above all, for it contains the key to an understanding of what automation and cybernetics imply.
“Cybernation and Culture” (1966), pp 97-98
Year: 1966
“The more specialized an academic became, in McLuhan's view, the more desperately he clung to his expertise and the less he wanted to understand others or wanted others to understand him. Eventually McLuhan concluded, for these and other reasons, that ‘all ignorance is motivated.’ Most people simply do not want to expand their awareness.”
Philip Marchand
Marshall McLuhan The Medium and the Messenger: a Biography (1989), p 126
Year: 1989
Chapter:
Ignorance
"Jobs" represent a relatively recent pattern of work. From the fifteenth century to the twentieth century, there is a steady progress of fragmentation of the stages of work that constitute "mechanization" and "specialism." These procedures cannot serve for survival or sanity in this new time.
The Medium is the Massage (1967), p 20
Year: 1967
Even specialist learning in higher education proceeds by ignoring interrelationships; for such complex awareness slows down the achieving of expertness.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 101
Year: 1964
Dewline Cards
Just as work began with the division of labor, duration begins with the division of time, and especially with these subdivisions by which mechanical clocks impose uniform succession on the time sense.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, pages 145-146
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Mechanization | Time
Pornography, then, is specialism in sex. You take one small aspect of it and push it up to high intensity. The same with emotion, any sort of emotion. Like in the newspaper where you see the grief of a mother photographed. This is ghastly and indecent, because you have the whole situation torn apart and just one little aspect pushed up to high intensity.
“Love,” Saturday Night, February, 1967, p 26
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Photography
Scientists have no interest even of the effects of science on people. Just take the recent O.M.B. hearings which revealed over and over again that the experts who had designed the various city developments said over and over: “Nobody asked us what would be the social effects of any of these plans. Our job was to deal with traffic.” They were indignant to think that they should have been aware of the destruction of the city by their new traffic arrangements. A scientist is a specialist, and the specialist is not interested in causation because cause is not specialist, it is total.
“Marshall McLuhan: An Interview? The Mike (University of Toronto, St. Michael’s College), Vol XXII, February 4, 1971, p 3
Year: 1971
Chapter:
Science
The great speed-up of transactions creates a huge depression, or drop-out of human values. Radio did this in the 20’s and TV in the 60’s. When Henri Bergson was asked how coull you tell if the speed of all things was doubled, he answered: “I could tell by the impoverishment of my consciousness.” What applies to the complex system of human awareness equally concerns the corporate life. The overall speed of transactions creates vast depression of body and spirit alike.
“Where It’s At, Where It’s Going,” unpublished 1969 essay, typescript, p 1
Year: 1969
Classification isn’t the beginning of a subject. It is the end.
The Hot and Cool Interview (1967) in Media Research (1997), p 62
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Classification | McLuhanisms & Zingers
But [three millennia ago] when mankind turned from hunting to farming, and then to creating cities, empires, pyramids and temples, men and women were split apart in ways that went far beyond biology. Many men became specialists – kings, workers, merchants, warriors, farmers, scribes – in the increasingly complex social machine. Most women fell heir to less specialized but separate domestic tasks.
“The Future of Sex” with George B. Leonard for Look magazine, 1967, typescript, p 3
Year: 1967
The bureaucratic organization of print cliche with uniform products and prices gives rise to capitalism as well as to the corporate activities of the scientist. This became more and more pronounced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Adam Smith and Ben Franklin are sufficient exemplars of the glorification of fragmentation applied to industry and morals alike.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 196
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Print
Sex is dead because sex was specialist. Any anthropologist will tell you that sex is not a special subject. It cannot be separated from total complex of society. Any society that pretends it can separate sex from other things is in trouble. The mini skirt is there to indicate that the end is in sight.
“The Hardware-Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?” Speech within a Panel (date andfull context unclear); published in the Proceedings of the Conference at the Center for Continuing Education, University of Chicago (1969). Transcript, p 5
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Goodbye Linearity
In school and business and laboratory alike, the specialist cannot get into action in time to have relevance. The ground changes faster than the figure.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 104
Year: 1972
Beckett sees the bicycle as the sign and symbol of specialist futility in the present electric age, when we must all interact and react, using all our faculties at once.
Understanding Media, 1964, Signet paperback edition, p 166
Year: 1964
It was this civilization’s genius to manipulate matter, energy and human life by breaking every useful process down into its functional parts, then producing any required number of each. Just as shaped pieces of metal became components of a locomotive, human specialists became components of the great social machine.
“Learning in the Global Village” with George Leonard (1969), p 107
Year: 1969
…the printed book made possible much subdivision and partitioning of subjects that had previously been included in the major disciplines. Grammatica included all that we now associate with cultural history and the New Criticism. Dialectica embraced the whole range of scientific theory and classification. Rhetorica involved the arts of wisdom and eloquence extended to all fields.
“The Electronic Age – the Age of Implosion,” 1962, p 200
Year: 1962
Chapter:
Trivium
The more quickly the rate of information exchange speeds up, the more likely we will all merge into a new corporate entity, devoid of true specialism which has been the hallmark of our own private identities.
“Ma Bell Minus Nantuck Gam” with Bruce Powers, 1981, p 9 of manuscript
Year: 1981
When the pressure of living in a world of data creates the need for integral awareness, overload leads to pattern recognition. You can only specialize just so much, then you have to go integral again.
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, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 87
Year: 1967