A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
Β©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Technology (21 quotes)
It is the framework that changes with new technology, and not the picture within the frame.
Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 219
Quote #6677
Year: 1964
Chapters: Technology | Change
The most human thing about us is our technology.
β€œPredicting 1983,” 1976, contribution to Man and the Future of Organizations, p 19; after Peter Medawar
Quote #6678
Year: 1983
Chapters: Extension Theory | McLuhanisms & Zingers
Electric technology is a qualitative extension of this age-old man-machine relationship; 20th Century man’s relationship to the computer is not by nature very different from prehistoric man’s relationship to his boat or to his wheelβ€”with the important difference that all previous technologies or extensions of man were partial and fragmentary, whereas the electric is total and inclusive. Now man is beginning to wear his brain outside his skull and his nerves outside his skin; new technology breeds new man.
β€œPlayboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 74 (1969), in The Essential McLuhan, p 264-265
Quote #6679
Year: 1969
Chapter: Tools We Shape, Reshape Us
As for technological acceleration, it now approaches the speed of light. All nonelectric media had merely hastened things a bit. The wheel, the road, the ship, the airplane, and even the space rocket are utterly lacking in the character of instant movement.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge, p 348
Quote #6680
Year: 1964
Chapter: Change
[Defining media, or technologies] It makes no difference whatever whether one considers as artefacts or as media things of a tangible 'hardware' nature such as bowls and clubs or forks and spoons, or tools and devices and engines, railways, spacecraft, radios, computers, and soon; or things of a 'software' nature such as theories or laws of science, philosophical systems, remedies or even the diseases in medicine, forms or styles in painting or poetry or drama or music, and so on.
Introduction, Laws of Media with Eric McLuhan, 1988, p 3
Quote #6681
Year: 1988
Chapters: Dropout | Laws of Media | Living Unity
It is easier to teach the arts (especially contemporary arts) to those who are participants in our technological culture than to those who sit on the sidelines registering distaste and incomprehension.
Letter to Norbert Wiener, May 28, 1951 (LAC)
Quote #6682
Year: 1951
Chapters: Education | Teaching
The machine is power. And practical politics mean quite simply that the machine must assume increasingly its most powerful form. The shape and rational form of man is now irrelevant. The will of all society has persisted in this direction for more than a century. Enthusiastic abdication on behalf of the machine. Eager embrace of man when deloused of his humanity by technics. That is the impatient wish, the wider hope embedded in the Luce publications [Time, Life, and Fortune] examined here.
β€œThe Psychopathology of β€˜Time’ and β€œLife’ (1949), reprinted in The Scene Before You (1955), p 159
Quote #6683
Year: 1949
Chapters: He’s Doubtful | Human Scale | Tools We Shape, Reshape Us
Technology is an abstract tyrant that carries its ravages into deeper recesses of the psyche than did the sabre-toothed tiger or the grizzly bear.
The Mechanical Bride, 1951, p 45
Quote #6684
Year: 1951
Chapters: He’s Doubtful | McLuhanisms & Zingers | Tools We Shape, Reshape Us

Drawn to McLuhan #2

Two-panel comic illustration of a boxing match: a humanoid figure made of tumbling alphabet letters wearing "BRECE" shorts faces off against a muscular boxer with a smartphone for a head, under a "LITERACY VS ELECTRONIC" ring sign; in the second panel the smartphone boxer knocks the letter-man apart with a "K.O." punch.
β€œIt may even prove to be the case that the entire tradition of phonetic writing, which is co-extensive with our Western world and the Graeco-Roman tradition, cannot sustain the electronic impact.”
Illustrated period scene of a man in early-1900s suit and cap stepping into a Ford Model T outside the "Biograph Theatre" marquee advertising "The Artful Dodger," with a thought bubble above showing rows of parked cars at an outdoor movie screening.
β€œNew means create new goals.”
Illustrated interior of a rustic coffee shop with several patrons seated separately, each connected by small thought-bubble trails to one large shared blank thought bubble overhead, suggesting wordless, intuitive communication.
β€œThe future of language presents the possibility of a world without words, a wordless, intuitive world, like a technological extension of the action of consciousness.”
Illustration set in a lush jungle showing a feather-adorned Indigenous tribesman facing a translucent glowing green humanoid figure whose body is composed of streaming binary code.
β€œThe new electronic man and pre-literate man see eye to eye.”
Stylized line-art illustration of an elevated highway with a bright yellow central lane sweeping up into a sharp architectural peak, flanked by a modern city skyline of glass skyscrapers.
β€œThe road is our major architectural form.”
Illustration of a cluttered living room where a mother holds a baby on a couch surrounded by several children, most staring blankly at an unseen glowing television screen while a teenager scrolls a phone.
β€œWe are not the true parents of our children.”
Illustrated lineup of warriors and soldiers spanning history left to right β€” an Indigenous fighter, Roman legionaries, a medieval knight, WWI and modern soldiers, a futuristic armored figure, and an astronaut on the moon β€” set against a backdrop of fire, smoke, and space.
β€œWe put on our technology as evolutionary clothing.”
Comic-style illustration of a robed orator gesturing dramatically from a pedestal, his speech rendered as a jumbled speech bubble of scrambled Greek letters, while an assistant arranges the same letters into ordered puzzle pieces spelling Greek words like "ΑΑΕ΀Η" and "Ξ”Ξ™ΞšΞ‘Ξ™ΞŸΞ£Ξ₯ΝΗ" on a scroll.
β€œWriting is the spatialization of thought.”
The YouTube logo: a red rounded rectangle with a white play-button triangle beside the black "YouTube" wordmark on a black background.
[With electronic media, we are building] β€œβ€¦a new tribal encyclopedia of auditory incantation”
Has technology adopted as its province the entire human psyche and the earth which it inhabits?
β€œSpace, Time and Poetry”, Explorations 4, 1955, p 59
Quote #6685
Year: 1955
Chapter: Mastering Technology
I suppose you could call a man in an iron lung a cyborg but the concept has far wider implicatons than this.
β€œAlarums in a Brave New World”: Review of Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman by D.S. Halacy, in Winnipeg Free Press, December 11, 1965, p 73
Quote #6686
Year: 1965
It was A.N. Whitehead who pointed out that one of the great sources of confusion in our time is the illusion that all chance and innovation occur within this unchanging environment. This illusion is a legacy of the Newtonian system. This system has no more place for change than it has for people.
β€œAlarums in a Brave New World”: Review of Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman by D.S. Halacy, in Winnipeg Free Press, December 11, 1965, p 73
Quote #6687
Year: 1965
Chapter: Change
[Arthur C. Clarke:] β€œOne day we may be able to enter into temporary unions with any sufficiently sophisticated machines, thus being able not merely to control but to become a spaceship or a submarine or a TV network…” … One of the interesting things about [this] passage…is its prediction that the mind of man may become enextensive, not only with his artefacts but with his concept. Is this not to suggest the philosophical idea that the mind in knowing is also a maker? Pushed far enough, that is to say, science fiction can become humanistic philosophy.
β€œAlarums in a Brave New World”: Review of Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman by D.S. Halacy, in Winnipeg Free Press, December 11, 1965, p 73
Quote #6688
Year: 1965
Are there sufficient signs that technological man is prepared to manipulate, as his matter, both earth and spirit?
β€œSpace, Time and Poetry,” Explorations 4, 1955, p 59
Quote #6689
Year: 1955
Chapter: Mastering Technology
It makes no difference whatever whether one considers as artefacts or as media things of a tangible β€˜hardware’ nature such as bowls and clubs or forks and spoons, or tools and devices and engines, railways, a spacecraft, radios, computer, and soon, or things of a β€˜software’ nature such as theories or laws of science, philosophical systems, remedies or even the diseases in medicine, forms or style in painting or poetry or dreams or music, and so on. All are equally artefacts, all equally human, all equally susceptible to analysis, all equally verbal in structure.
Introduction, Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 3
Quote #6690
Year: 1988
Chapters: Dropout | Laws of Media | Living Unity
The cathode tube carries β€˜the charge of the light brigade’. The tube carries both the charge and the answering barrage. The result is the painting of images by the ballet of electrons.
β€œNotes on the Media as Art Forms”, Explorations 2, 1954
Quote #6691
Year: 1954
The real revolution is in this later and prolonged phase of β€œadjustment” of all personal and social life to the new model of perception set up by the new technology.
The Gutenberg Galaxy, (1962), p 27
Quote #6692
Year: 1962
Chapters: Anticipating Change | Tools We Shape, Reshape Us
The vanishing point is a perspective made possible by a fixed view on a fixed target. TODAY NOBODY CAN OCCUPY A FIXED POSITION OR FIND A FIXED OR STATIONARY TARGET. Electric technology excludes both possibilities.
The DEW-Line Newsletter Vol 1 # 3 (1969), p 5
Quote #6693
Year: 1969
Chapter: Perspective, Point of View
What we have today, instead of a social consciousness electrically ordered, however, is a private subconsciousness or individual "point of view" rigorously imposed by older mechanical technology.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 108
Quote #6694
Year: 1964
Chapters: Identity | Perspective, Point of View | Today’s Transition
Machiavelli saw the new private morality created by the new specialist technology of print as creating new political goals.
From ClichΓ© to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 46
Quote #6695
Year: 1970
Chapters: Anticipating Change | Print
If we persist in a conventional approach to these developments our traditional culture will be swept aside as scholasticism was in the sixteenth century. Had the Schoolmen with their complex oral culture understood the Gutenberg technology, they could have created a new synthesis of written and oral education, instead of bowing out of the picture and allowing the merely visual page to take over the educational enterprise. The oral Schoolmen did not meet the new visual challenge of print, and the resulting expansion or explosion of Gutenberg technology was in many respects an impoverishment of the culture, as historians like Mumford are now beginning to explain.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 71
Quote #6696
Year: 1964
Chapters: Advice | Anticipating Change
The reason that Baudelaire and Valery were so impressed by the work of Edgar Allan Poe was that Poe had demonstrated the relation between the stages of knowing and the stages of making. Poe was the first to grasp the new feedback pattern of electric technology.
β€œA Phantom City Phaked” (1964), p 2
Quote #6697
Year: 1964
Chapter: Poe, Edgar Allan
Technologies seem to be as unconscious as much in their origins as in their effects. A new technology enjoys a brief reign as an anti-environment, then it becomes environmental in turn.
Letter to J. Miller, January 8, 1965
Quote #6698
Year: 1965
Chapter: Unconscious
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