More and more I feel compelled to consider causation as following from effects. That is, the effects of the telegraph created an environment of information that made the telephone a perfectly natural development. In a certain sense, therefore, the effects of the telephone provided the invention of the actual hardware instrument. This, of course, is non-lineal, non-sequential causality. In fact, it suggests that causes and effects are simultaneous, if anything.
Letter to anthropologist Ashley Montagu, October 22, 1971, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 446
Year: 1971
Chapter:
Causality
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan