A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Found 21 quotes (8 duplicates hidden).
Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 110
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Acoustic Space
Modern advertising is a world of ideograms.
“Technology and Political Change,” International Journal, Vol 7, No. 3, Summer, (1952), p 192 (page number on reprint on file)
Year: 1952
Chapter:
Advertising
The next medium, whatever it is--it may be the satellite environment or the extension of consciousness--will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form; but this process whereby every new technology creates an environment that translates the old or preceding technology into an art form, or into something exceedingly noticeable, affords so many fascinating examples I can only mention a few.
“The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion”, Perspecta, Vol.11, (1967), p 164, reprinted in On the Nature of Media, (2016), p 110
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Computer | Predictions
↪ Also at #5645
While artists like James Joyce can make a resonating universe with two words, computer programmers try to match universes of human knowledge and perception to the two-bit wit of their machines.
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 110
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Computer
The auditory and oral heritages of some cultures are being poured through the visual tradition of other cultures to the enrichment of all. But even movies and television are very different media, so, as is natural, the same item handled through both of these become quite changed.
“A Historical Approach to the Media” (1955), p 110
Year: 1955
Chapter:
Dialogue
Applying my principle that education must always concentrate its resources at the point of major information intake, we have merely to ask, from what sources do growing minds nowadays acquire most factual data? How much critical awareness is conferred at these points? It is a commentary on our extreme culture lag that when we think of criticism of information flow we still only use the concept of book culture, namely, how much trust can be reposed in the words of the message. Yet the bias of each medium is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.
A Historical Approach to the Media, in Teachers College Record, Vol.57, Issue.2,Nov (1955) ,p 110.
Year: 1955
Chapter:
Education
We could do for the classroom of our century what Erasmus did for the classroom of his time. We could make it the matrix of a cultural flowering much greater than that of the Elizabethan Age. For we possess, and to some degree we already experience, the facts of media cross-fertilization. The great eras of culture occur when a large area of oral or auditory experience is invaded by a visual medium. For the Elizabethans the whole folk wisdom of oral culture, centuries of oral disputation, and a huge backlog of vocal music were cross-fertilized by the printed page. A very rich auditory heritage was exposed via a visual medium with spectacular results.
“A Historical Approach to Media (1955)”, reprinted in Teachers College Record, Vol. 57, No. 2, November 1955, p 110
Year: 1955
Chapter:
Education
Drawn to McLuhan #10
To be involved means to be drawn in, to interact. To go on interacting, the student must get somewhere. In other words, the student and the learning environment (a person, a group of people, a book, a programmed course, an electronic learning console or whatever) must respond to each other in a pleasing and purposeful interplay. When a situation of involvement is set up, the student finds it hard to drag himself away.
“Learning in the Global Village” with George Leonard (1967), in Radical School Reform (1969), p 110
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Education
Eliot is specific ally saying here that the only way you can control any very complex anarchic situation is by parallel borders, a border or a frontier. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr. Yeats to have been the first contemporary to be conscious.
“The Marfleet Lectures”, March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 110
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Eliot, T.S.
It is also Mr. Eliot's method, since he is a man from Missouri who set up his cabin on the banks of the Thames in 1915 approximately, an example of premature brain drain.
“The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 110
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Eliot, T.S.
Today it is easy for us to perceive what programmed them as a hidden ground, because that ground has itself become a figure starkly portrayed against the new ground of the electric information environment Instant information, as an environment, has the effect of pushing all other subliminal effects up into consciousness.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 110
Year: 1988
Chapter:
Figure/Ground
The hijacker of a plane does not presume to operate the craft. He merely decides where it is to put down. So it is today with the very largest organizations. The larger the enterprise, the easier it is to shape its patterns and destinies, unknown to the occupants and 'owners'.
“The Hijacking of Cities, Nations, Planets in the Age of Spaceship Earth,” Explorations insert in University of Toronto's Varsity Graduate, Number 30, Spring, 1971, p 110
Year: 1971
Chapters:
Information | Management
↪ Also at #3653
This is the nature of acoustic space, which is constituted by its centre being everywhere and its margin being nowhere. Without the microphone the speaker is at a single centre, while with the microphone he is everywhere simultaneously — a fact which obsolesces the architecture of our existing churches.
“Liturgy and the Microphone”, 1974, in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 110
Year: 1974
Chapter:
LOM 2 - Obsolesce
Without our having any ideas about them whatever, [the media] still deeply affect our idea of past and present, of ourselves, and of our relations to others.
“A Historical Approach to the Media” (1955), p 110
Year: 1955
Chapters:
Media | Media Effects
↪ Also at #4536
The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.
“A Historical Approach to the Media”, in Teachers College Record, Vol.57, Issue 2, Nov (1955) ,p 110. Reprinted in Counterblast,(1970), p 119
Year: 1955
Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves.
“A Historical Approach to the Media” (1955), reprinted in reprinted from Teachers College Record, Vol 57, No. 2, November 1955, p 109-110
Year: 1955
Chapters:
Electric, Electronic | Media Reprocess Media
Suddenly the visual boundaries yielded to music; the symbolist poets discovered the acoustic space of auditory imagination.
Counterblast (1969), pp 110-111
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Music
The next medium, whatever it is - it may be the extension of consciousness - will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.
“Address at Vision ’65,” a talk given on Oct.23, 1965, at the University of Southern Illinois, printed in The American Scholar, Spring, 1966, pp.196-205.A variation of this was printed in “The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion”, Perspecta, Vol.11, (1967), p 164 ,variation reprinted in On the Nature of Media, (2016), p 110
Year: 1965
Chapters:
Computer | Next Medium [The]
↪ Also at #1269
In the world of business, the personal touch of private calligraphy was indispensable.
Readings and suggestions-Phonograph, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 110
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Paradox
You ask also about inflation and pollution and the breach with NATO, etc. I have an unpublished paper in which I try to explain that inflation also is the encounter of incompatible worlds, the clash between the old commodity markets and the new money, or information markets.
“Been Hoping We Might Meet Again”, p 110
Chapter:
Planet, Nature
The most primitive tribes of Australia and Africa, like the Eskimos of today, have not yet reached finger-counting, nor do they have numbers in series. Instead they have a binary system of independent numbers for one and two, with composite numbers up to six. After six, they perceive only "heap." Lacking the sense of series, they will scarcely notice when two pins have been removed from a row of seven. They become aware at once, however, if one pin is missing. Tobias Dantzig, who investigated these matters, points out (in Number: The Language of Science) that the parity or kinesthetic sense of these people is stronger than their number sense. It is certainly an indication of a developing visual stress in a culture when number appears. A closely integrated tribal culture will not easily yield to the separatist visual and individualistic pressures that lead to the division of labor, and then to such accelerated forms as writing and money.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, pp 110-111
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Tribal Societies