A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Television (81 quotes)
It was the funeral of President Kennedy that most strongly proved the power of television to invest an occasion with the character of corporate participation.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man , (1962), p 125
Year: 1962
Chapter:
Participation
With television both sight and sound were out of the wire and our culture stepped from of mechanization for the first time since the invention of writing, 5,000 years ago.
From his 1955 Report to the Ford Foundation, quoted in W. Terrence Gordon’s Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding (1997), p 163
Year: 1955
TV uses the eye as an ear, not as an eye.
In a talk to the Ontario Education College (1977)
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Dropout | McLuhanisms & Zingers
The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to “scrub” the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity like any corporate executive.
Culture is Our Business (1970), p 72.
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Youth
Television trains everyone. It has deepened the American psyche. America is no longer that visually dominated culture. It used to be concerned with the outside appearance and the packaging. Now it does not care. The visual world is no longer dominant in America. You can tell that the moment you see the kids, dressed in their crazy way. They are not dressed for the eye.
Interview with J.P.M. van Santen, October 25, 1972, Typed transcript, p 2
Year: 1972
Chapter:
America, North America
The new TV environment is an electric circuit that takes as its content the earlier environment, the photograph and the movie in particular. It is in the interplay between the old and the new environments that there is generated an innumerable series of problems and confusions. They extend all the way from how to allocate the time of children and adults to the problem of pay-TV and TV in the classroom. The new medium of TV as an environment creates new occupations. As an environment, it is imperceptible except in terms of its content.
“The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,” The University of Windsor Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, (1966), p1-2; reprinted in Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968),p 241 and McLuhan Unbound #4, (2017), p 6
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Media as Form
The Mackworth head-camera, when worn by children watching TV, has revealed that their eyes follow, not the actions, but the reactions. The eyes scarcely deviate f r o m the faces of the actors, even during scenes of violence. This head-camera shows by projection both the scene and the eye movement simultaneously. Such extraordinary behavior is another indication of the very cool and involving character of this medium.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 309
Year: 1964
Drawn to McLuhan #15
The fact is, the TV images come at you. They go inside you. It’s a total reverse of the movies. The industry is striving for photographic images. Trying to make TV like a photograph or movie is utter nonsense. The whole dynamic of TV is to go inside the viewer.
“Like Yoga Not Like the Movies,” Forbes, March 15, 1967, p 40
Year: 1967
One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system. News bulletins, time signals, traffic data, and, above all, weather reports now serve to enhance the native power of radio to involve people in one another. Weather is that medium that involves all people equally. It is the top item on radio, showering us with fountains of auditory space or lebensraum.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 298
Year: 1964
But the TV image is the first technology by which man has outered his haptic, or tactile, powers. Its effects, therefore, on the balance or ratio among our senses. Since at all times consciousness involves a ratio among the senses, any alteration of intensity in any of our senses causes an immediate "closure" or completion of pattern. Such new "closure" or completion is, in fact, a new posture of mind charged with new preferences and desires, as well as with new patterns of perception.
Whodunits as process (not narrative) still hold up on TV.
Culture Is Our Business (1970), p 100
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Balance
TV is as radioactive as radium.
Letter to Clair Booth Luce, August 29, 1977, in Letters (1988), p 534
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Media Effects
The TV child ends to hold his book about 4.6” in front of his eyes. At that distance, and Hurst did these measurements over the years, at this distance you use only one eye, so the TV child is also monocular…
Talk to Ontario Teacher Education Collage, 1977, p 8
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Youth
[TV]…makes the viewer the screen and drives him Inward. Its broken lines and points communicate a powerful tactual image, with sculptural contours rather than visual definition.
In “correspondence regarding the NAEB Report on Understanding New Media 1960 - 1963
Year: 1960
TOM SNYDER: What would happen if you could shut off television for 30 days in the entire United States of America?
MARSHALL MCLUHAN: It would be a kind of hangover effect because it’s a very addictive medium and you take it away and people develop all the symptoms of a hangover. Very uncomfortable. It was tried, remember? A few years ago they actually paid people not to watch TV for a few months…. It was in Germany. It was in the UK. And they discovered they had all the withdrawal symptoms of drug addicts, very uncomfortable, all the trauma of withdrawal symptoms. TV is a very involving medium and it is a form of inner trip and so people do miss it.
“What Television Does Best,” NBC TV appearance with Tom Snyder (1976), in “McLuhan Speaks” transcript, p 3
Year: 1976
The grimness that comes with TV afflicts our children profoundly, and they take themselves very seriously.
TV Interview with Eric Goldman, “The Open Mind,” WNBC (1965), Transcript, p 9
Year: 1965
Television is a tranquil and relatively individual medium, fostering many book values, indirectly.
Letter to John Wain (1960) in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 267
Year: 1960
Why must television elections be devoid of issues? Why must all points-of-view be excluded, or included (the result is the same) in t.v. elections?
“Media Log II”, p 12, (1959), quoted in a footnote in The Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 267
Year: 1959
I don't think Hitler would have lasted long on TV. Like Senator Joe McCarthy, he would have looked foolish. He was a very hot character. Like Nixon made a very bad image on television, he was far too hot a character. Much better on radio or on the movies. Not bad on the movies, which will take quite hot characters. But Nixon was hopeless on TV.
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 5:32
Year: 1977
For example, television as a medium is a total antithesis of the movie. In the movie you sit and look at the screen. You are the camera eye. In television you are the screen. You are the vanishing point as in an oriental picture. The pictures goes inside you. In the movie, you go outside into the world. In television you go inside yourself. The television form of experience is profoundly and subliminally introverting, an inward depth, meditative, oriental. The television child is a profoundly orientalized being.
“Television in a New Light” in The Meaning of Commercial Television, ed. Stanley Donner (1966), p 93
Year: 1966
TV has a strange effect on the eye muscles. It tends to paralyze, or to hypnotize, the motor muscles of the eyes. So that the much television-viewing person tends to have a very poor ability to move his eyes across the printed word, or on the printed page. And he needs exercises to correct this. And the exercises need to be taken quite early while he's in his early years because otherwise they harden. But the ideal exercise for this purpose is the trampoline for loosening up the eye muscles.
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 15:54
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Advice
The character of the television image, I think, fosters this kind of participation simply because it is a rather poor image, and it involves the viewer in a great deal of completion of the detail that is missing visually in that image. The act of seeing television is very much that of participation as in reading a detective story where you are very much with it precisely because you are not given very much narrative information. You have to fill it in.
“Popular / Mass Culture” (1960), in Understanding Me (2003), p 38
Year: 1960
The same event, handled by press or radio (in the absence of television), would have provided a totally different experience. The national "lid" would have "blown off" Excitement would have been enormously greater and depth participation in a common awareness very much less.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 285
Year: 1964
Tony Schwartz, in his book “The Responsive Chord”, explains this very tricky problem about television as a new environmental medium, by saying that the TV image uses the eye as an ear.
“Living in an Acoustic World,” Speech at the University of South Florida, 1974, “McLuhan Speaks” transcript: 50.01 and forward
Year: 1974
With satellites, television ceases to be environmental and becomes content, becomes art form. As long as [TV] has environmental power it is invisible, and as we notice only those characteristics of it which belong to the old technology, movies. When television becomes an old technology, we will really understand and appreciate its glorious properties.
“Television in a New Light,” The Meaning of Commercial Television, edited by Stanley Donner (1966), p 107
Year: 1966
TV is not just sight and sound but tangibility in its visual, contoured, sculptural mode. What have been the social effects of this sudden extension of our sight-touch powers? What have been the specific changes in our attitudes to public space, to privacy, and to the nature of environmental materials resulting from TV?
“Insidethe Five Sense Sensorium” (1961), p 51
Year: 1961
But the TV image is the first technology by which man has outered his haptic, or tactile, powers. Its effects, therefore, on the balance or ratio among our senses. Since at all times consciousness involves a ratio among the senses, any alteration of intensity in any of our senses causes an immediate "closure" or completion of pattern.”
“The TV Image: One of Our Conquerors,” February 22, 1962, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 286
Year: 1962
Chapter:
Balance
[TV] has the power of translating the Western literate back into the world of non-literate synaesthesia, just as effectively as the phonetic alphabet can hoick the native out of his haptic matrix into a world of mechanistic individualism, and sequential cause-and-effect relations.
“Inside the Five Sense Sensorium” (1961), p 50
Year: 1961
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facts of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electric groping over surfaces.
“New Media and the Arts,” Arts in Society magazine Fall/Winter, 1964, p 242
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Senses
The TV thing itself is very, very polluting. It goes right into the nervous system. The problem is how literate is your society, your family circle, your immediate circle. Your child is coming out in an intensely literate world, so he can take a fair amount of TV without too much harm. But to the ordinary kid without a lot of literacy, TV will just turn off any possibility of left hemisphere.
Interview, Maclean's, March 7, 1977
Year: 1977
[With television] you are drawn into that tube, as an inner trip. You're totally involved. You have no objectivity, no distance. And it is acoustic. It resonates. But this is a hidden ground, because superficially people think they're looking at a visual program. And they're not. They're not looking at all—they're absorbed, involved in a resonating experience. And it is not objective, it is entirely subjective.
Interview with California Gov. Jerry Brown, The CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1977-8
Year: 1977
Currently color TV is upgrading the Negro identity image via its iconic power.
Letter to Edward T. Hall, July 23, 1969, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 383
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Hemispheres of the Brain
From one point of view the scanning finger of the TV screen is at once the transcending of mechanism and a throwback to the world of scrive. Any history of technology is filled with such unexpected reversals of form resulting from new advances.
“Printing and Social Change,” Printing Progress: A Mid-Century Report. Cincinnati, Ohio, 1959, p 91
Year: 1959
Chapter:
Chiasmus, Flips, Reversals
Television may be as decisively the successor to writing as oral speech was the predecessor of writing.
“An Historical Approach to the Media of Communication”, August 1955. Excerpts from a talk given July 26, 1955, at Teachers College, Columbia University. In Communication Lines (Columbia), p 2
Year: 1955
TV is not a visual medium at all. It is a medium of audio-tactile.
To Dick Cavett on his TV show, 1970
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Telegraph
Of the new languages, television comes closest to drama and ritual. It combines music and art, language and gesture, rhetoric and color.
“The New Languages” with Edmund Carpenter, The Chicago Review, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring, 1955, p 47
Year: 1955
Since TV, Canadian, British, and American politics have cooled off almost to the point of rigor mortis.
To interviewer Robert Fulford, This Hour Has 7 Days, final episode, 1966, transcript reprinted in “McLuhan Speaks” transcript
Year: 1966
Therefore, educationally speaking, TV has very strange consequences and could never be used as a mere transportation device.
“Living at the Speed of Light,” 1974 lecture, in Understanding Me (2003), p 243
Year: 1974
Anybody who looks as if he might be a teacher, a doctor, a businessman, or any of a dozen other things all at the same time, is right for TV. When the person presented looks classifiable, as Nixon did, the TV viewer has nothing to fill in.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 330
Year: 1964
The television image, said James Joyce, is "the charge of the Light Barricade." TV is like a cartoon, consisting of lines that come at you. You view it as you must view an X-ray image, by using your eyes as hands, moving around the edges of the lines, just as your eyes explore a cartoon and fill in the spaces between the lines with your imagination or your other senses to make a picture.
“Technology and the Human Dimension” (Interview with L. Forsdale, 1974), in MM: The Man and His Message (1989), p 14
Year: 1974
The specialized acoustic image of the demagogue on radio, or talking movie, is suddenly shifted into iconic or "cartoon" form on TV. Earlier I indicated why the TV image is a kind of X-ray mesh of lines and dots that comes at the viewer.
“Technology and the Human Dimension” (Interview with L. Forsdale, 1974), in MM: The Man and His Message (1989), p 23
Year: 1974
TV has changed our sense-lives and our mental processes. It has created a taste for all experience in depth that affects language teaching as much as car styles.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 332
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Teaching
One of the major pressures of T V has been to encourage the "teaching machine." In fact, these devices are adaptations of the book in the direction of dialogue. These teaching machines are really private tutors, and their being misnamed on the principle that produced the names "wireless" and "horseless carriage" is another instance in that long list that illustrates how every innovation must pass through a primary phase in which the new effect is secured by the old method, amplified or modified by some new feature.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition p 292
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Teaching
But to bring intensity to the TV medium is fatal, or at least comic, as witness Archie Bunker's earnestness. It becomes cartoon, like Bugs Bunny, because the TV image is so different in its structure from radio or film. Take President Nixon. He's somewhat untakeable on TV, but quite acceptable on radio or on film.
“Technology and the Human Dimension”, Interview, L. Forsdale, 1974, reprinted in MM: The Man and His Message, 1989, p 23
Year: 1974
When the news team seeks to become the news source by means of direct dialogue rather than by remote report[ing] of the event, they are being true to the immediacy of the TV medium in which comments outrank the event itself
“Sharing the News”, (1971), 6
Year: 1971
In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.
Understanding Media, 1964,
Year: 1964
Why should the broken line of the television mosaic emphasize the sculptural contours of objects?”
McLuhan Hot and Cool, 1967, p 158
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Questions He Asks
TV, as the latest archetypal environment or technology, is very much in this dishevelled phase. The movie remained in such a dishevelled phase for decades. Whether Telstar is already a new archetypal environment that assumes the present TV form as its content will appear fairly soon.
“New Media and the Arts”, Arts in Society Magazine, Vol. 3, No.2, September (1964), p.242
Year: 1964
Poor old Richard Nixon hasn’t got a chance. He has no mask. He has just his bare face hanging out, just private Dickie Nixon. The public are dying to see themselves there. They don’t want to see Nixon; they want him to put them on. If he would even grow sideburns, if he would do anything, they would be transformed in their attitude to Nixon.
“Table Talk of Marshall McLuhan”, 1971, p 45
Year: 1971
Chapters:
Masks | Politics and Government
As long as it has environmental power it is invisible, and as we notice only those characteristics of it which belong to the old technology, movies. When television becomes an old technology, we will really understand and appreciate its glorious properties”.
Speech at the U Texas-Stanford Symposium, 1966, taken from typescript, later printed essay in, The Meaning of Commercial Television, ed., Stanley Donner (1966)
Year: 1966
Well, to be honest, I have only seen a bit of Rickles. I've seen more of the other people. They have a mask. They put on a corporate mask or image. They don't use a private face.
“What TV Does Best”, 1976, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 249
Year: 1976
You remember Ed Sullivan, the great stoneface? He was a corporate mask, like sculpture, and he could identify with a great range of people.
“What TV Does Best”, 1976, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 249
Year: 1976
Yes, well, one of the effects of television is to remove people s private identity. They become corporate peer-group people just by watching it. They lose interest in being private individuals. And so this is one of the hidden and perhaps insidious effects of television.
“What TV Does Best “, 1976, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 255
Year: 1976
Television fosters and favors a world of corporate participation in ritualistic programming. That's what I mean when I say it's a cool medium. It's not a hot medium.
“What TV Does Best”, 1976, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 253
Year: 1976
Chapter:
Hot & Cool
…one of the effects of television is to remove people s private identity. They become corporate peer-group people just by watching it. They lose interest in being private individuals. And so this is one of the hidden and perhaps insidious effects of television.
“What TV Does Best”, 1976, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 255
Year: 1976
But the color TV has produced quite a number of nostalgic revivals, including the comic book as a collector's form, and the antics and the summer cottages and basements of North America, probably contain fortunes unknown to the occupants in all comic books.
CBC TV show, Fletcher Markle’s “Telescope 67” 1967; Transcript
Year: 1967
Carter is, after all, a corporate man. He comes from a [Southern] corporate culture. Ford comes from an individualist, fragmented culture, a Northern culture. There's a huge gap between those images.
“TV as a Debating Medium”, 1976, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 262
Year: 1976
Radio had a fantastic and profound effect in retrieving the ordinary tribal consciousness of Germany in the twenties and thirties. TV, which is an addictive inner trip (regardless of program), sent American youth in pursuit of the occult and group awareness.
“Violence of the Media”, 1976, in MM: The Man and His Message, 1989, p 94
Year: 1976
The veteran TV viewer is physically clad in the garment of his favorite program tattooed on his skin. The TV viewer is a screen, whereas the movie viewer merely looks at the screen.
Dew-Line 1.7
When the viewer himself becomes a kind of discarnate information pattern, the saturation of that pattern of an electric environment of similar patterns give us the world of the contemporary TV user. This is a parallel to the computer – the only technology that llives on, and produces, the same material.
“A Last Look at the Tube” (1978). Typescript, p 4
Year: 1978
Chapter:
Discarnate
Why should the broken lines of the television mosaic emphasize the sculptural contours of objects?
NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 133
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Questions He Asks
If you want to understand the nature of TV, you must make a complete inventory of All the things that have changed in the past 12 years, in dress, in social behavior, in program tastes. I mean, after all, the “Ben Casey” type of program would not have been tolerated in any earlier medium…. This is an example of the new seriousness, inwardness, depth of this medium.
Eric Goldman TV interview, 1966, p 9 of transcript
Year: 1966
With perfect psycho-mimetic skill, they [the kids of TV] carry out the commands of the TV image. They pore, they probe, they slow down and involve themselves in depth.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 269
Year: 1964
…the TV screen just pours that energy into you, which paralyzes the eye; you are not looking at it, it is looking at you.
Talk to the Ontario Education College, 1977, p 6 of typescript
Year: 1977
If we raised the visual intensity or the visual component of the TV image, it might serve enormously to ease the transition from the old mechanical age to the electronic age.
(Our Dawning Electric Age, 1965, p 17)
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Present [The]
The Kennedy funeral, in short, manifested the power of TV to involve an entire population in a ritual process. By comparison, press, movie, and even radio are mere packaging devices for consumers.
(Murder by Television, 1964, pp 222-223)
Year: 1964
The ideal show on Pay TV would be a great composer rehearsing a symphony, not playing his symphony.
“It Will Probably End the Motor Car” (1976), p 27
Year: 1976
I should think that the kiss in the Western world has lost a great deal of its personal and private qualities. It is almost like handshaking.
P. Mansaran interview (unpublished), 1967, p 4
Year: 1967
Seurat anticipates the spaces of TV.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 157
Year: 1968
The power of TV to reveal the motives of action in the human countenance is part of the general X-ray process inherent in electric technology. The Watergate hearings made this clear when the boys in the back room became show business. The impossibility of secrecy under electronic conditions makes espionage and man-hunting the principal activity of our time, and renders the old forms of wheel-dealering impracticable. Electric power will be used by the old guard of the 19th century minds to implement even further the patterns of centralized hardware and authorit, and there will be a continuing rejection of consumer values and specialism.
“X-Ray Vision,” contribution to a Macleans forum, January 1974
Year: 1974
One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast.
Conversation with California Governor Gerry Brown, 1977
Year: 1977
When the news seeks to become the news source by means of direct dialogue rather than by remote report of the event, they are being true to the immediacy of the TV medium in which comments outrank the event itself.
“Sharing the News—Friendly Teamness: Teeming Friendness.” Commissioned by the ABC Owned Television Stations for their private distribution. Copyright shared by ABC and McLuhan Associates, Ltd. 44 p.. Rpt., as “Television views the news: hot events on a cool medium, where the audience is the actor.” Television / Radio Age, September 6, Vol. 19, No 3, September 6, 1971
Year: 1971
I predict a return of hot sauces to American cuisine. With color TV, the entire sensory life will take on a whole new set of dimensions.
“UNDERSTANDING M'LUHAN, BY HIM: 'PEOPLE MAKE GREAT MISTAKE TRYING TO.” By Wallace Turner, New York Times, Nov 22, (1966), p 43, Reprinted in "Marshall McLuhan? A Drama of the Absurd in Four Acts." By Peter Hamill, Cosmopolitan, vol. 163, no. 6, Dec, (1967), p 84, pp. 77-85, 149
Year: 1966
[Senator] “McCarthy folded a week after he went on television. And if Huey Long had gone on television he would have been a flop at once. TV will not take a sharp character, a hot character. It’s a cool medium, and our politics are being cooled off to the point of rigor mortis, according to many people. The nature of this medium which calls for so much participation does not give you a completed package, a completed image. You have to make your image as you go. Therefore, if the person who comes in front of the TV camera is already a very complete and classifiable type of person – a politician, a highly obvious doctor type, lawyer type – the medium rejects him because there’s nothing left for the audience to view or to complete, and they say this guy’s a phony. There’s something wrong with this guy.
“Popular / Mass Culture” (1960) in Understanding Me (2003), p 40
Year: 1960
The upsurge in drug taking is intimately related to the impact of the electric media. Look at the metaphor for getting high: turning on. One turns on his consciousness through drugs just as he opens up all his senses to a total depth involvement by turning on the TV dial.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media.” By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 66, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 253
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Drugs
The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it’s the universal experience of TV watchers.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media.” By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 66, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 253
Year: 1969
Baseball on television is committing suicide and is disappearing very rapidly from the sports scene on television., because it’s a one-thing-at-a-time game. It belongs to the nineteenth century and to our old, specialist phase of culture…. One thing at a time, perectly executed: the new world is not like that. It’s an interphase world of many phases and many methods simultaneously, and it prefers football or more tactile sports. Skin-diving, anything rather than baseball. Baseball is high definition. It’s precise, elegant, finished.
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 93
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Linear and Nonlinear | Sports and Games
Television doesn’t need a time sequence. The images don’t have to be related in time any more than they do in a newspaper…. The commercial follows the Perry Mason show, but you don’t connect them.
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, p 168
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Linear and Nonlinear