Everybody at a football game is nobody simply by virtue of the fact of their deep involvement in an experience simultaneously shared by many others. In such a situation, the most famous person in the world becomes a nobody. This is a structural fact, and when considered in relation to our wired planet, where everybody is involved in everybody’s experience, this is the overwhelming backlash of reduction to nonentity – the creation of mass man. The mass man is not the vulgar or the stupid or the unthinking man, but anybody and everybody who experiences the electric situation of instant information. Electronic man is no abstraction, but rather the existing individual in a simultaneous culture. Having had his private individuality erased anonymously, he is paranoiac and much inclined to violence, for violence is a quest for identity, seeking to discover, “Who am I?” and ‘What are my limits?”
Speech at the Conference on Management Information Systems” (1971), transcript
Year: 1971
Chapter:
Corporate
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan