A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

The formula for hypnosis is “one sense at a time.” And new technology possesses the power to hypnotize because it isolates the senses. Then, as Blake’s formula has it: “They became what they beheld.” Every new technology thus diminishes sense interplay and consciousness, precisely in the new area of novelty where a kind of identification of viewer and object occurs.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 272
Year: 1962
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan