A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Found 214 quotes (101 duplicates hidden).
We are living in a situation which has been called "future shock." Future shock, in fact, is culture lag, that is, the failure to notice what is happening in the present.
“The End of the Work Ethic”, in Understanding Me (2003), p 205
Year: 2003
Chapters:
Anticipating Change | Rear View Mirror
↪ Also at #5975
At the present time, one of the effects that is heaped up a mile high for which no cause has yet appeared, but a cause will shortly appear, is anti-gravity. We have an enormous amount of anti-gravitational effect and activity - helicopters, airplanes, and astronauts - but we don’t have the cause; we just have the effects. Within our lifetimes or your lifetimes, the cause of anti-gravity, a simple gimmick, will present itself, and all things will levitate instantly. The problem will be how to hold things down on the ground. But this is obvious, as obvious as your being there or my being here. The effects are here. The causes will be here shortly.
"Living at the speed of light", in Understanding Me (2003), p 240
Year: 2003
Chapters:
Causality | Predictions
KERMODE: But how would the arrival of the electric technology modify our views of time, for example? MCLUHAN: I think it is well enough manifested in Lewis Carroll, where both time and space are suddenly subjected to total discontinuity and non-conformities and disconnections.
“The Future of Man in the Electronic Age” (Interview with Frank Kermode on BBC), in Understanding Me (2003), p 65
Year: 2003
Chapter:
Discontinuity
Money
Money increases transactions; it obsolesces barter; it retrieves potlatch or conspicuous waste; and it flips into credit cards, which is not money at all.
“Living at the speed of light,” in Understanding Me (2003), p 243
Year: 2003
Chapter:
Laws of Media
The electric age, this resonant acoustic time, retrieves, above all, the occult. The occult is by definition the form that is congenial to acoustic man, and he, therefore, appears to be superstitious.
“Art as Survival in the Electric Age”, reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 222
Year: 2003
Chapter:
Occult
Pattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force is the way out of the maelstrom. The huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilities of evasion of consequences of destruction.
McLuhan´s Wake (NFB Film, 2003), Transcript: 01.03
Year: 2003
Chapter:
Pattern Recognition
Think of the tremendous shift in political power that is going on at this moment through the use of television in politics.
“Popular / mass culture”, in Understanding Me (2003), p 39
Year: 2003
Chapter:
Politics and Government
Drawn to McLuhan #12
McCarthy folded a week after he went on television. And if Huey Long had gone on television he would had 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
“Popular / mass culture”, in Understanding Me (2003), p 40
Year: 2003
Chapter:
Politics and Government
Our politics require much more hotting up than the TV medium will give them. TV is ideal when you get two experts like ourselves discussing TV.
“Predicting Communication via the Internet”, in Understanding Me (2003), p 100
Year: 2003
Chapter:
Politics and Government
The new politics is in the same position. The old politics had parties, Policies, planks,
Opposition. The new politics is concerned only with images. The Problem in the new politics is to find the right image. So search committees are formed to find the candidates who have the right image.
“Living at the Speed of Light”, in Understanding Me (2003), p 234
Year: 2003
Chapter:
Politics and Government
When notes for briefing individuals or groups are first typed and then Xeroxed, it is as if a private manuscript were put in the hands of the general reader. The typewriter plus photocopying thus, unexpectedly, restores many of the features of confidential hand-written records.
“Do Books Matter?” Proceedings of a seminar promoted by the Working Party on Library and Book Trade Relations and the National Book League; reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), pages179-180 and Essential McLuhan (1997, UK) p 279.
Year: 2003
Chapter:
Xerography
↪ Also at #7486
The world of the flat iconic image… is a much better guide to the world of sound than the three-dimensional and pictorial art.
“Cybernation and Culture” (1966), in Understanding Me (2003), p 97
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Acoustic Space
I'm suggesting that the very components that make for a divided consciousness also can, with a certain encouragement, become the means of an inclusive consciousness such as Bacon took for granted in his own case.
“The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 125
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Acoustic Space | Consciousness
↪ Also at #1308
Decision-making in business and in education as much as in diplomacy is now a matter of grasping these configurations. They have a language and a syntax of their own as much as does the iconology of pictorial advertisement, so that it is not only the business of education today to teach these new languages, but to teach how we can in our previously achieved configurations of culture be enriched by these new powers and not merely dissolved by them.
“Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media”, (1959), speech reprinted in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, (2003), p 5
Year: 1959
Chapter:
Advertising
Now an American not only does not like acting or putting on a public, but he does not put on a corporate or standard voice when he speaks. He uses his private voice, and this, of course, enables the Americans to have no class consciousness and no class structure.
“TV News as a New Mythic Form, 1970”, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 168
Year: 1970
Chapter:
America, North America
That is why in the electronic age we are threatened by new fast-moving and flexible media – while we sit in a Maginot Line convinced of the importance of our position.
“Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media”, (1959), speech reprinted in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, (2003) , p 3
Year: 1959
Chapter:
Anticipating Change
In the electronic age… you cannot have jobs; you can only have a role.
“Open-Mind Surgery, Fordham lecture”, Sept. 18, (1967), in Understanding Me (2003), p 155
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Anticipating Change
The surfacing of man’s subconscious came with the telegraph, the telephone, radio, and then TV and other electric media. It is impossible to sublimate or keep anything hidden at that speed. So we have to invent a new concept of civilization in order to live at the speed of light.
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 296
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Anticipating Change
We have no precedent for this, no way of getting our bearings, nobody to tell us what's happening. We´re suddenly projected into a world where everything happens at once....
“The Marfleet Lectures”, March 16-17 1967, reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 129
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Anxieties Caused By Change | Electric, Electronic
↪ Also at #1899
In the early part of the electric age Sam Butler, a biologist, to whom we owe the aphorism, "It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all”.
“Art as Survival in the Electric Age” (1973), in Understanding Me (2003), p 210
Year: 1973
Chapters:
Aphorism | McLuhanisms & Zingers
↪ Also at #4359
It is one of the ironies of the electronic age that the businessman must become alert and highly trained in the world of the arts. It is one of the mysteries of cybernation that it is forever challenged by the need to simulate consciousness.”
“Cybernetics and Human Culture,” (1964), in Understanding Me (2003), p 49
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Art, Artists | Management
And may it not be that the new importance that is now accorded to the arts, both in education and in industry, is owing to our awakened sense of the role of art and artists in raising subliminal and non-verbal factors of experience to the level of conscious articulation?
“Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media”, (1959), speech reprinted in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, (2003), p 9
Year: 1959
Chapter:
Art, Artists
If we have used the arts at their very best as a means of heightening our awareness of the otherwise unconscious environment, then turning a whole skill to the making of the environment itself into a work of art, namely, of transcendent awareness, would seem to be the logic of this form. … The possibility of using the total environment as a work of art, as an artifact, is a quite startling and perhaps exhilarating image but it seems to be forced upon us. The need to become completely autonomous and aware of all the consequence of everything we’re doing before the consequences occur is where we’re heading.
“The Future of Man in the Electric Age” (1965), in Understanding Me (2003) p 75
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Art, Artists
Art makes the corporate and communal accessible to the individual, whose task it is to assimilate the tradition, to modify it in relation to the new situations that are continuously forming.
The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 119
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Art, Artists | Individual
↪ Also at #2918
The young can only conclude that we are not serious. And this is the meaning of their decline of attention.
“The Electronic Revolution”, 1959, reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 3
Year: 1959
Well, their attention span is very weak, as you know. We've invented the one-liner in place of the joke because people can't wait around to hear you tell a joke. It takes too long. "As for critics," said Sam Goldwyn, "don't even ignore them." That's a one-liner. That's all we have time for. Attention span gets very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 271
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Attention
The area of attention has shifted from the older characters to the ground. Now that includes audience. The audience has now become actor. Don't you think this is a tendency as a result of developments in our time?
“TV News as a New Mythic Form” (1970), in Understanding Me (2003), p 164
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Audience, Public, Mass
Yeats himself was a great frontiersman, and there's a famous passage in Yeats in which he says that one of the defects of French literature is its lack of double plots or parallel structures, without which you cannot achieve the emotion of multitude. It is by a parallel between two kinds of actions which Shakespeare frequently uses that you achieve the emotion of multitude.
“The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17 1967; reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 111
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Authority of Knowledge
I think that if we are to have a constitutional order and balance among these new oligarchs [new media], we shall have to study their configurations, their psychodynamics, and their long-term messages. To treat them as humble servants (audiovisual aids) of our established conventions would be as fatal as to use an X-ray unit as a space heater.
“Electronic Revolution”, 1959 speech, in Understanding Me (2003), p 4
Year: 1959
Chapters:
Balance | Media Study
↪ Also at #4666
And, whereas the mechanical age had been one of center-margin structures, the electronic age is inevitably one of multiple centres-without-margins. Under conditions of simultaneity of access to information, Cuba is not a margin politically, nor is Laos. They are centres as much as London or Moscow or Washington, yet our assumptions are still otherwise. Hence our confusion.
“The Humanities in the Electronic Age” (1961), in McLuhan Unbound (2003), p 15
Year: 1961
Unlike Vico and Joyce but like Freud, Blake mistook a psychology for metaphysics and theology. His rigorous monism had no place for “the many” save as modes of primal, divine energy. The created world is a part of fallen god-head and is essentially evil. Existence and corruption are the same. This makes for simplicity, intensity and inclusiveness of outlook, but it may not have been of as much use to Blake the poet as he himself supposed. It made Blake an encyclopedic allegorist but it also led him to attach a final rather than a provisionary value to his allegorical imagery.
“Inside Blake and Hollywood”, in Sewanee Review, Vol.55, No.4, October, (1947), p 710, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound (2003),
Year: 1947
Chapter:
Blake, William
The great poetical allegorist like Dante proceeds by simile, although the entire work is a huge metaphor. Blake proceeds by metaphor or identity of tenor and vehicle and ends up with a work which requires a key to open. His intellectual structure is not realized dramatically in the “major” poems but has to be set beside them. Professor Frye does not regard this as a defect since his business in his book is exegesis and not criticism.
“Inside Blake and Hollywood”, in Sewanee Review, Vol.55, No.4, October, (1947), p 710; reprinted in McLuhan Unbound (2003)
Year: 1947
That is the paradox of Blake – that he so largely became the image of the thing he hated and fought, namely Lockean rationalism and abstraction.
““Inside Blake and Hollywood”, in Sewanee Review, Vol.55, No.4 ,October, (1947), p 712; reprinted in McLuhan Unbound (2003),
Year: 1947
Chapter:
Blake, William
Blake makes quite explicit that when sense ratios change, men change. Sense ratios change when any one sneer or bodily or mental function is externalized in technological form: The Spectre is the reasoning Power in Man, & when separated From Imagination and closing itself as in steel in a Ratio Of the things of Memory, It thence frames Laws & Moralities To destroy Imagination, the Divine Body, by Martrydoms & Wars. Blake’s view was that [quoting Northrop Frye] “history as linear time is the great apocrypha or mystery which has to be ‘rejected’ since “the whole of human life is seen and understood as a single mental form.” (p. 340) The linear view of history began with Petrarch and Leonardo da Vinci and ended with Gibbon and Hume. So obsessive a metaphor as that of linear perspective is important enough to deserve some explanation, especially since we are now deep in the process of extricating ourselves from it.
“Inside Blake and Hollywood”, in Sewanee Review, Vol.55, No.4, October, 1947, p 710; reprinted in McLuhan Unbound (2003)
Year: 1947
This is a characteristic situation. That bomber pilot is very much like the person introducing any new technology using ordinary human business resources and existing institutional means.
“Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 286
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Bomb
↪ Also at #684
The Bomb, like automation, is a new environment consisting of a network of information and feedback loops. In moving from the mechanical to the electronic age, we move from the world of the wheel to the world of the circuit. And where the wheel was a fragmenting environment, the circuit is an integrating environmental process. The Bomb, as pure information, consists of higher learning. It is, as it were, the extension division of the modern university in its highest research areas, creating a very tight environment indeed.”
“Cybernetics and Human Culture” (1954), in Understanding Me, (2003), p 47
Year: 1954
Chapter:
Bomb
“The Bomb takes over all earlier technology and organization.”
“Cybernetics and Human Culture” (1954), in Understanding Me, (2003), p 48
Year: 1954
Chapter:
Bomb
There are many ways in which the book and literate values are threatened by the mere fact of the electric service environment.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 175
Year: 1972
What Illich fails to see is that when the answers are outside, the time has come to put the questions inside the school rather than the answers.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 203
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Breakdown as Breakthrough
Nature and history seem to have agreed to designate us in Canada for a corporate, artistic role. As the U.S.A. becomes a world environment through its resources, technology, and enterprises, Canada takes on the function of making that world environment perceptible to those who occupy it. Any environment tends to be imperceptible to its users and occupants except to the degree that counter-environments are created by the artist.
“The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17, 1967, reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 104
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Canada
If the car had not lost its real meaning in our lives, there would be no oil price hikes. That is, nobody would even dream of allowing the oil price hikes to occur. The rise in oil prices, of course, is a promotional deal. There's no question.”
“Living at the Speed of Light” (Speech U of So Fla), 1974, reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 241
Year: 1974
Chapter:
Car
Many people don’t seem to recognize very easily that a cartoon, a mere outline, a mere contour is a profoundly involving experience that requires participation of all our senses.
“The Medium Is the Massage” [essay, not the book] (1966), reprinted in “Understanding me” (2003), p. 94
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Cartoons, Comics
Whereas a photograph is more limited to one sense, merely the visual, a cartoon, though it seems much simpler, is actually more profound in involving our senses, our sensuous lives.
“The Medium Is the Massage” (1966), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p. 94
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Cartoons, Comics
[TV is an] iconic medium having much in common with the cartoon for which it is ideally suited, much more well-suited than for pictures.
“The Future of Man in the Electric Age” (1965), in Understanding Me, (2003), p 56
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Cartoons, Comics
Lewis Carroll makes inventories of effects as causes that relate modes of dynamic perception. They are neither definitions of concepts nor expressions of opinion, since all patterns of perception merge and metamorphose in the very act of exploration and discovery. They avoid value judgments, and serve as guides to insight and to comprehension through re-cognition of the dynamic structures that occur in all processes. In replaying such patterns we are not taking any side but many sides, also the inside.
“Symposium: Causality, the Argument in an Electric World” (1973), in McLuhan Unbound (2003), p 30
Year: 1973
↪ Also at #5782
…for example, nobody ever knew what the effect of the wheel would be on the arrangement of human life.”
“First Lecture, Fordham University”, 1967, in Understanding Me (2003), p 144
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Change
I want to mention, by way of explaining my own approach to these matters, that my kind of study in communication is a study of transformation, whereas information theory and all the existing theories of communication that I know of are theories of transportation.”
“Living at the Speed of Light” (1974), in Understanding Me (2003), p 230
Year: 1974
Chapter:
Change
Now if China follows the same course - and it appears to be about to do that - then the transformation of the Chinese world will be very rapid twenty years. They would flip out of their culture, wipe off their whole ancient culture in twenty years and become incredibly aggressive and specialized and goal-oriented, because the specialist man always has a goal.
“Living at the Speed of Light”, Speech. U of So Fla. (1974), reprinted in Understanding Me, 2003, p 236
Year: 1974
Chapter:
China, Chinese
Every technology has its own ground rules, as it were. It decides all sorts of arrangements in other spheres. The effect of script and the ability to make inventories and collect and store data changed many social habits and processes back as early as 3000 B.C. However, that’s about as early as scripts began. The effect of rearranging one’s experience, organizing one’s experience by these new extensions of our powers, are quite unexpected. I think we needn’t plunge in at this time, but I think one of the very definite effects of scripting was the rise of what we call architecture. It made possible, instead of just scooped out dave space or wraparound wigwams and igloos, enclosed space…. The effect of writing as a way of organizing experience stepped up the visual factor until things like architecture became possible.
“The Future of Man in the Electric Age” (interview with Frank Kermode, 1965), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 58
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Classification
The entire use of yes-no bit programming is from the alphabetic modes of Western civilization. But many people look to the computer to bypass present forms of human action and limitation. Yet, even the written and printed word, it might be argued, has helped us to surpass ordinary human scale.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 176
Year: 1972
Instead of going out and buying a packaged book of which there have been five thousand copies printed, you will go to the telephone, describe your interests, your needs, your problems, and say you're working on a history of Egyptian arithmetic. You know a bit of Sanskrit, you're qualified in German, and you're a good mathematician, and they say it will be right over. And they at once xerox, with the help of computers from the libraries of the world, all the latest material just for you personally, not as something to be put out on a bookshelf. They send you the package as a direct personal service. This is where we're heading under electronic information conditions. Products increasingly are becoming services.
“Predicting Interactive Communication via the Internet”, TV Appearance on This Hour Has Seven Days, CBC-TV with Robert Fulford (1966), in McLuhan Speaks Transcript, p 3, reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 101
Year: 1966
Cybernation seems to be taking us out of the visual world of classified data back into the tribal world of integral patterns and corporate awareness.
“Cybernetics and Human Culture” (1964), in Understanding Me (2003), p 50
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Computer | Retribalizing
↪ Also at #6146
As societies once more become cohesive and corporate, the entire community can become an actor in a way that is normal in Oriental and non-Western societies in general.
“Roles, Masks, and Performances” (1971), reprinted in McLuhan Unbound (2003), number 12, p 6
Year: 1971
Chapter:
Corporate
The new pattern is one of small teams comprising clusters of diverse competencies with personnel accustomed to the crossing of functional lines in a perpetual dialogue of interpenetrating awarenesses.
“Popular / Mass Culture” (1960), in Understanding Me (2003), p 19
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Dialogue
The implication of discarnate, disembodied existence in an information world is one for which our educational system has not quite prepared us.
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 288
Year: 1979
The sender goes on the air and is instantaneously everywhere without a body. Electricity creates the angelic or discarnate being of electronic man, who has no body.
“Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 288
Year: 1979
When you are "on the air," you are everywhere at once. This is a power beyond that of the angels, according to Thomas Aquinas, for they can only be in one place at a time.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 201
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Discarnate
So our world beginning as early, in fact, as Rimbaud, our whole environmental world electromagnetically moved into a world of discontinuity and disconnection and unique spaces rather than homogeneous spaces.
“The Future of Man in the Electric Age” (1965), in Understanding Me (2003), p 65
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Discontinuity
This is real cool. Jazz as compared with classical music has many of these aspects of discontinuity and very much room for fill in. But where the information or data level is low, the fill-in or participation is high.
“The Future of Man in the Electric Age” (1965), in Understanding Me (2003), pp 70-71
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Discontinuity
The world of discontinuity came in most vividly with the telegraph and the newspaper. The stories in the newspaper are completely discontinuous because they are simultaneous. They're all under one dateline, but there's no story line to connect them. TV is like that. It's an X-ray, mosaic screen with the light charging through the screen at the viewer. Joyce called it, "the charge of the light barricade." In fact, FW is the greatest guide to the media ever devised on this planet, and is a tremendous study of the action of all media upon the human psyche and sensorium. It's difficult to read, but it's worth it.
“Open Mind Surgery “lecture at Fordham U (1967), in Understanding Me (2003), p 152
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Discontinuity
[A discontinuous format ] …is like the detective story. It involves you more deeply. It arouses curiosity more than any possible connection could do. But the strange fact about the missing link or about a discontinuity is that the audience leaps to fill it in, and this is true in jazz and so on. But at any rate, I think it fair to say that jazz and rock have turned English into a world language because you cannot sing jazz or rock in any other language but English.
“Art as Survival in the Electric Age” (1973), in Understanding Me (2003), p 217
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Discontinuity
MCMANUS: What now briefly is this thing called media ecology?
MCLUHAN: It means arranging various media to help each other so they won’t cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages. So, you can do some things on some media that you cannot do on others. Therefore, if you watch the whole field, you can prevent this waste that comes by one cancelling out the other.
MCMANUS: But do you think that perhaps at the end of your studies of media ecology, you're going to advise a cut-down on watching television? $500 for anyone who will give it up for a day?
MCLUHAN: Europeans have cut back on that almost down to nothing long ago because they realized that it threatened literate values very much. An hour a week is about what the French child gets for television.
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 17:57. Also in Understanding Me (2003), p 275
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Ecology | Media Study
↪ Also at #4677
In the same way that industry now makes the consumer the producer by means of motivation research, do not educators now recognize the education problem to be motivation rather than consumption of packaged information?
“Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media”, (1959), speech reprinted in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, (2003), p 9
Year: 1959
Chapter:
Education
As we extend our educational operation by television and videotape we shall find that the teacher is no longer the source of data but of insight. More and more teachers will be needed for the type of depth instruction that goes naturally with television, with light through rather than light on.
“Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media”, (1959), speech reprinted in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, (2003), p 10
Year: 1959
Chapter:
Education
With a parallel increase of accessibility of all cultures to all cultures and of all subject matters to all others, the redesigning of the educational establishments of the Western world is equally urgent not as an ideal but as a necessity.
“Popular / Mass culture” (1960), in Understanding Me (2003), p 19
Year: 1960
The entire planet becomes a little round schoolhouse. The whole environment becomes a teaching machine.
“The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 130
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Education
Is not the emergence of a global community of learning a natural outcome of a world in which the production and transportation of commodities finally merges with the movement of information itself?
“Popular/Mass Culture (1960)”, in Understanding Me (2003), p 31
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Education
One way of putting it is to say, for the first time in human history, there is more information and data outside the classroom or the school situation than inside. The sheer amount of levels of information outside in the environment far exceed the amount of data and information inside the classroom. This is not just of very recent origin. It’s occurring more and more rapidly and on a much bigger and bigger scale.
“The Medium is the Massage (1966)”, in Understanding Me (2003), p 89
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Education
And just as industrial production now depends entirely on higher education, and as culture has become the main business of the globe, so learning and not teaching may well become the most highly paid profession. As we begin to learn for participation, rather than for specialist, applied knowledge patterns of action, we can look back and see how the growing habit of conferences already forecasts this change in the roles of teacher and learner. Applied knowledge for production is now taken for granted and knowledge shifts to the global role of community and participation in a way commensurate with the roles of the new media.
“Popular/Mass Culture” (1960), reprinted in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews (2003), p 10-11
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Education
No, this is an age in which the New Criticism or psychology or anything else, the word used in all these forms is depth. Reading in depth. Psychology in depth. Everything now is in depth.
“The Communications Revolution (1960)”, in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews (2003), p 41
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Education
At electric speeds nobody makes decisions but everybody becomes participant in a complex situation for which he can take no responsibility whatever.”
The End of the Work Ethic, 1972, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 200
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Electric, Electronic
In the electronic age, when time and space factors are very much reduced in information flow, it is once more natural for us, as for men in small oral communities, to think mythically. For today it is easy to perceive consequences embedded in any kind of innovation. If we don’t see them, they clobber us very quickly.
“Popular/Mass Culture”, Speech (1960), in Understanding Me (2003), pp 17-18
Year: 1960
These characteristics do not develop in the cultural milieu of electric sound and information, for the acoustic world, like the "auditory imagination" defined by T. S. Eliot, is not private or civilized but tribal and collective.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me, 2003, pp 178-179
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Eliot, T.S.
↪ Also at #2001
In fact, you'll find the great instructors in all media matters are these painters and poets of the later nineteenth century and people like James Joyce and Eliot and Pound and others. They spent their lives studying our senses as they go out technologically into the environment because they realized this had a profound effect on language.
The Medium Is the Message, 1960, in Understanding Me (2003), pp 94-95
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Eliot, T.S.
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.
Eliot went to England and made visible for the first time to the twentieth-century English the new world of French literary and artistic discovery. The environment of European art of the past decades had become so invisible to the English that it took this American to reveal it by his artistic activities.
“The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 111
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Eliot, T.S.
In Four Quartets Eliot mentions the words "slip, slide, perish, decay. “Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place" ("Burnt Norton" V). Eliot has something quite special to say about this mask of language, this mask of putting on the reader.
“Art as Survival in the Electric Age” (1973), in Understanding Me, 2003, p 215
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Eliot, T.S.
When Eliot says that he puts Mark Twain equal or even with Dryden and Swift, he indicated that Dryden and Swift had updated the English language in the 1700s by getting rid of rhetoric and getting rid of ornament and using a bare colloquial statement.
“Art as Survival in the Electric Age” (1973), in Understanding Me, 2003, p 215
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Eliot, T.S.
MCMANUS: So there are some parallels? MCLUHAN: Well, sure, the habit of discontinuous and multileveled perception, but it goes partly also with in my interest in Joyce, Pound, Eliot, because they are also multi-faceted people and very right-hemisphere people.
“Violence as a quest for identity” (Mike McManus TVO Interview), 1977, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 273
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Eliot, T.S.
T.S. Eliot has a line which seems to indicate awareness of the discarnate state of electronic man: "We all go into the silent funeral; nobody's funeral, for there is nobody to bury.”
Letter to Clare Boothe Luce, April 5, 1979, in Letters, 1987, p 543
Year: 1979
Chapters:
Discarnate | Eliot, T.S.
↪ Also at #1543
And the whole of the English language took on a tremendous new oral life from radio. I'm sure that this was carried straight on into jazz and rock music.
TV News as a New Mythic Form, 1970, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 160
Year: 1970
Chapter:
English Language
The huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilities of evasion of consequences of destruction. By studying the pattern of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we are involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival.
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 285
Year: 1979
All you can look at in the rear-view mirror is literally the foreseeable future. Now, at the speed of light, there is no foreseeable future. You are there literally. It does not matter what situation you choose to consider. There is literally no possible future. You are already there the moment you name the situation. That is why in our age there are no goals. That is the reason for the streakers' antics: they are protesting the disappearance of goals. Where are we going? We are all dressed up with no place to go. We think we have taken all the right school courses, studied the right subjects, but now it all seems pointless. Where do we go from here?
“Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 293
Year: 1979
Chapters:
Environment | Speedups
↪ Also at #6538
[T]echnologies have for thousands of years simulated not the body, but fragments thereof. It was the city alone that the image of the human body as a unity became manifest.
“Cybernation and Culture” (1964), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p I01 [confirm]
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Environment
This power to extend ourselves was used as a theme by Hans Hass in his book The Human Animal. In it he considers this human ability to create additional organs as “an enormity from the evolutionary standpoint - an advance laden with unfathomable consequences.”
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 283
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Evolution
We now move from educational extension to even greater extension, but in depth as well.
“Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media”, (1959), speech reprinted in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, (2003), p 9
Year: 1959
Chapter:
Extension Theory
In all patterns, when the ground changes, the figure too is altered by the new interface.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 180
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Figure/Ground
The civilized man imagines that he is going to help the native by stripping off the native’s world of myth and legend, ritual and superstition. The paradox is that in the electric age we ourselves are moving into, returning to, the acoustic world of simultaneous involvement and awareness, experiencing the surfacing of the subliminal life…. We had imagined that we could simply strip off the acoustic culture of these primitives or these natives in order to civilize them, but the same stripping off of our civilization is taking place at the same time, by means of the new electric technology. We are losing our civilization even faster than we stripped off the institutions of the Indians and the Africans.
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 296
Year: 1979
The future of the book raises the question of whether men can ever program their corporate social lives in accordance with any civilized pattern by any other means than that of the printed book.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me, (2003), p 176
Year: 1972
Teilhard de Chardin is a little more aware of the meaning of the electronic than Darwin. But this Darwinian obsession with mans´ thumbs, fingers, and appendages as biological evolution is a perfect example of the rear-view mirror.
“Open-Mind Surgery” (1967) in Understanding Me (2003), p 152
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Global Village
The nineteenth century was the old machine age of fragmentation, literacy, and specialism, the one that the liberal mind has never got beyond. It's never studied the later environment.
“Open-Mind Surgery,” Fordham lecture (1967) in Understanding Me (2003), pp 151-152
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Goodbye Linearity
MCLUHAN: I think that is one of the functions of news, to blow up a storm so big that you can dissipate it by coverage. It’s a way of getting rid of the pressure by coverage, that you can actually dissipate a situation by giving it maximal coverage. It’s very disappointing from one angle, but it’s survival from another.
SNYDER: Now don't you get into alarming people?
MCLUHAN: That's done by rumors, not by coverage, hints, suggestions. But the big coverage merely enables people to get together and enjoy a sort of a group emotion. It's like being at a ball game, a big group emotion. But I do think that that taught me that one of the mysteries of coverage is that it's a way of releasing tension and pressure, and that storm was doomed as soon as it got all that coverage.
“What TV Does Best” (Tom Snyder interview, 1976) in Understanding Me (2003), p 252
Year: 1976
Chapters:
Gossip and Rumors | News
↪ Also at #5052
So the right hemisphere, by pushing up into dominance, is making the old left-hemisphere world, which is our educational establishment, our political establishment, make it look very foolish. It's just a flip that is taking place.
What TV Does Best, 1976, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 247
Year: 1976
Chapters:
Between Two Ages | Hemispheres of the Brain
↪ Also at #622
It has to do with the slang phrase "the hot and the cool, which puzzles many people. The way it's used in slang reverses the meaning of cool . "Cool" in the slang form has come to mean involved, deeply participative, deeply engaged. Everything that we had formerly meant by heated argument is now called "cool" in slang. The idea that cool has reversed its meaning has some bearing on the fact that our culture has shifted a good deal of its stress into a demand that we be more committed, more involved in the situations in which we ordinarily work.
“The Future of Man in the Electric Age” (Frank Kermode interview, 1965), in Understanding Me (2003), p 66
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Hot & Cool
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
Chapters:
Hot & Cool | Television
↪ Also at #6789
[Of the photograph] By its snapshotting quality it enhances aggression and private power over people. It obsolesces privacy. retrieves the past as present; it brings back the big-game hunter.
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 287
Year: 1979
Chapters:
Hunters of Information | Laws of Media
↪ Also at #3313
…the TV camera is very much more selective and abstract than the motion picture camera. In fact, what makes the pictorial as opposed to the iconic is the inclusion of a vast amount of detail. The filling-in of space with great quantities of detail is what the Renaissance painters learned to do in the third dimension. They discovered that you could take space and fill it with objects. The iconic man doesn’t fill space with objects. He makes space. The icon form tends not to be three-dimensional space so much as a made, shaped, molded, modulated resonating space.
“The Future of Man in the Electric Age” (Frank Kermode interview, 1965), in Understanding Me (2003), p 68
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Iconic
This leads to the theme of violence as a response to situations in which you feel you have lost your identity, situations in which you have been ripped off by too-rapid changes, where you have suddenly been flipped from one situation to another without warning and you suddenly are minus your identity. You don't know who you are. You don't know where you are. This leads to a response of violence
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 280
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Identity
The nobody in real life is a person who becomes quite intractable, quite violent as a way of rediscovering "Who am I" and "How do I re-establish my image, myself in this world." Our popular forms of entertainment tend toward that direction.
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 281
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Identity
Attention span gets very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977), in Understanding Me (2003), p 271
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Identity
Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It’s called being mass man.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977), in Understanding Me (2003), p 268
Year: 1977
By the way, one of the big parts of the loss of identity is nostalgia. And so there are revivals on all hands, in every phase of life today, revivals of clothing, of dances, of music, of shows, of everything. We live by the revival. It tells us who we are or were.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977), in Understanding Me (2003), p 269
Year: 1977
One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There´s always more than you can cope with. Now the young have devised a strategy for dealing with this quite apart from just inattention. They have devised a much more potent strategy of myth-making.
“The Marfleet Lectures” March 16-17 (1967); reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 135
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Ignorance
[In a political TV debate] The image is what mattered, and anything that could hold the attention on the image was all that mattered from the point of view of the arrangers.
“TV as a Debating Medium” (1976), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 258
Year: 1976
Chapter:
Image
American Telephone and Telegraph alone greatly exceeds the capitalization of General Motors. The production and consumption of information, that is, is the main business of
Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media”, (1959), speech reprinted in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, (2003), p 5
Year: 1959
Chapter:
Information
We seem to be moving from the age of specialism to the age of comprehensive involvement.
“Cybernetics and Human Culture” (1964), reprinted in Understanding Me, 2003, p 50
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Involvement | McLuhanisms & Zingers
↪ Also at #4402
And the whole of the English language took on a tremendous new oral life from radio. I'm sure that this was carried straight on into jazz and rock music.
TV News as a New Mythic Form, 1970, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 160
Conversation is improvisation, so that the new interest in musical improvisation reveals new aspects of the meaning of verbal conversation.
“Jazz and Modern Letters,” Explorations 7, 1957, p 3
Year: 1957
Chapter:
Jazz
The Protestant work ethic, as characterized by private goal-seeking and self-advancement is meaningless in a world of electric information.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 187
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Jobs
And the symbolists - the Rimbauds, the Wagners, the Baudelaires - began to examine the inner mental landscape as something that could be programmed as a means of enriching consciousness, of creating an inclusive consciousness. Instead of just creating a mood as the Romantic artists had done, they began to work on the idea of the total consciousness. And they became intensely interested in the mythic consciousness, in the corporate consciousness of the mythic man, and in the Jungian archetype”
The Medium Is the Massage” (1964), in Understanding Me (2003), p 92
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Jung, Carl G
But the language of industrialized areas has lost its oral quality and oral rhythms and seems to be incapable of translating the new sounds of technology or humanizing the new sounds through that language.
“Art as Survival in the Electric Age” (1973), in Understanding Me, (2003), p 217
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Language
The entire drama of conflict between individual and mass is most usefully studied under the aspect of the role of a poet in relation to his medium, because a language is a mass medium in all senses. Nobody in particular made it. Yet individuals have always to think and dream and feel in terms of this mass medium. The poet is in a special way the custodian and rejuvenator of language.
“Popular/Mass Culture,” Speech (1960), in Understanding Me (2003), p 16
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Language
For heaven knows how long, people have encountered each new technology by translating it back into the old familiar one. You know all the types of examples of that. The first motor cars were made with buggy whip holders. And the new automation computer devices are being made as if they were card catalogues. This strange habit of looking backward when moving forward is one that perhaps won't quite bear up, isn't quite consistent with jet speeds and electronic speeds.
“The Medium Is the Massage” (1966), in Understanding Me (2003), p 86
Year: 1966
Chapters:
Law of Implementation | Rear View Mirror
↪ Also at #5991
The zipper, the homely zipper. It amplifies the grip, the clasp. It obsolesces the button, the snap.
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 287
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Laws of Media
Spectacles exaggerate or enlarge or enhance the visual function; they obsolesce another function; they retrieve a much older function; and they flip in to the opposite form.
“Living at the Speed of Light”, Speech to U. of So Florida), 1974, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 243
Year: 1974
Chapter:
Laws of Media
Zipper
The zipper, the homely zipper. It amplifies the grip, the clasp. It obsolesces the button, the snap. It retrieves longflowing robes, easy to manage. It reverses into Velcro drape, no clasps, no buttons, no zipper, no closure at all.
“Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 287
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Laws of Media
Clock
The clock amplifies work. Until the clock was invented, what we call work was almost impossible to organize. It obsolesces leisure. It retrieves history as art form by fixed chronology - immeasurable, sequential chronology capable of visual time as measured by the clock. It reverses when pushed all the way into the eternal present, a nowness. “Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 288
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Laws of Media
The clock amplifies work. Until the clock was invented, what we call work was almost impossible to organize. It obsolesces leisure.
“Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, 1979, in Understanding Me (2003), p 288
Year: 1979
Chapter:
LOM 2 - Obsolesce
The Sputnik event was another thing altogether which simply obsolesced the planet itself as nature disappeared into an art form.
The End of Work Ethic, 1972, in Understanding Me (2003), p 200
Year: 1972
Chapter:
LOM 2 - Obsolesce
That is, political parties and their explicit policies have simply been obsolesced by the images presented by the party leaders on the one hand, and the services taken for granted by the community, regardless of the party that happens to be in power, on the other hand.
“The End of Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me, 2003, p 203
Year: 1972
But the possibility of retrieval as a form of discovery is something we all know from our own memories.
“The Medium is the massage”, 1966, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 80
Year: 1966
Chapter:
LOM 3 – Retrieve
When audience participation becomes too extensive, the villains on trial flip into public heroes because the audience quickly identifies with them, especially when they are men who are carrying out robotlike activities which necessarily resemble those of the average audience.
“The End of the Work Ethic”, 1972, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 193
Year: 1972
At electric speed, everything becomes X-ray. Watergate is a nice parable or example of how secrecy was flipped into show business.
Living at the Speed of Light (Speech, U of So Fla), 1974, in Understanding Me (2003) , p 237
Year: 1974
That is to say, [Wyndham] Lewis diagnosed the fondness of the avant-garde painters and poets for newspaper and cinematic techniques as an intellectual failure and also the abrogation of all moral responsibility to Western values.
“Popular/Mass Culture: American Perspectives” (1960), in Understanding Me (2003), p 16
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Lewis, Wyndham
In creating the detribalized individual, phonetic literacy created the need for a new educational program. Plato, says [Eric] Havelock, as the first to tackle the problem directly. Plato came up with a spectacular strategy. Instead of the tribal encyclopedia, he advocated classified data. Instead of corporate wisdom, he taught analytic procedures. Instead of the resonating tribal wisdom and energy, Plat o proposed a visual order of ideas for learning and organization.
“Cybernetics and Human Culture” (1964), in Understanding Me (2003), p 50
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Literacy
So obsessive a metaphor as that of linear perspective is important enough to deserve some explanation, especially since we are now deep in the process of extricating ourselves from it.
“Inside Blake and Hollywood”, in Sewanee Review, Vol.55, No.4, October, (1947),p 710; reprinted in McLuhan Unbound (2003)
Year: 1947
…our natural responses to media and to technology are irrelevant… we cannot trust our instincts or our natural physical responses to new things. They will destroy us. How are we to bypass, or offset, the merely physical response to new technology and new environments created by new technology?
This problem has not been raised by anybody, except that we have to live with it every day.
Edgar Allan Poe’s story “A Descent into the Maelström” had tremendous influence on the nineteenth-century poets and symbolists like Baudelaire, Flaubert, and others. In this story, Poe imagines the situation in which a sailor, who has gone out on a fishing expedition, finds himself caught in a huge maelstrom or whirlpool. He sees that his boat will be sucked down into this thing. He begins to study the action of the ström, and observes that some things disappear and some things reappear. By studying those things that reappear and attaching himself to one of them, he saves himself. Pattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force is the way out of the maelstrom. The huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilities of evasion of consequences of destruction. By studying the patterns of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we are involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival.
Survival cannot be trusted to natural response or natural instinct, since the brain stem is not provided with any means of responding to man-made environments.
“Man and Media,“ lecture at York University (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), pp 284-285
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Mastering Technology
Survival indicates that we grasp by anticipation the inherent causes and not the effects of the electronic media in all their cultural configurations and make a fully conscious choice of strategy in education accordingly.
“Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media” (1959), in Understanding Me (2003), p 5
Year: 1959
Chapter:
Mastering Technology
Today we experience that kind of bewilderment that ensues when an individual and private culture begins to resume an involvement in the corporate and collective modes of awareness with all the depth and comMIT/Routledgement that implies.
“The Marfleet Lectures”, March 16-17 1967, reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p103
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Mastering Technology
↪ Also at #3765
My values are strongly centered in literacy, which I teach day and night.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity,” 1977, in Understanding Me (2003), p 272
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
I am violently and arrogantly Protestant by family tradition; but let no English Government therefore counter my allegiance: I am English enough to be an inveterate Republican and Home Ruler. It is true that one of my grandfathers was an Orangeman; but then his sister was an abbess; and his uncle, I am proud to say, was hanged as a rebel.
“The Marfleet Lectures”, March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 108
Year: 1967
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
A New Yorker cartoon a few months ago showed two fish that had climbed out on the shore. One said to the other, “This is where the action is." A wit has said we don't know who discovered water, but we're pretty sure it wasn't a fish.
“The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17 (1967),reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 106
Year: 1967
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
Technology is something we did to ourselves. Why become indignant or enthusiastic about a wheel or a telegraph?
First Lecture at Fordham University (1967) in Understanding Me (2003) pp 142-143
Year: 1967
Chapters:
McLuhanisms & Zingers | Values & Value Judgments
↪ Also at #7262
We are losing our civilization even faster than we stripped off the institutions of the Indians and the Africans.
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 296
Year: 1979
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
The irrational has become the major dimension of experience in our world.
“Culture without Literacy”, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 126 reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 311, additional reprint in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 136, and McLuhan Unbound #6, (2003)
Year: 1953
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
You cannot see the writing on the wall till your back is up against it.
“Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 279
Year: 1979
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
A print-oriented world is a consumer world.
“Popular/Mass Culture”, Speech (1960), in Understanding Me (2003) p 15
Year: 1960
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
This strange habit of looking backward when moving forward is one that perhaps won't quite bear up, isn't quite consistent with jet speeds and electronic speeds.
“The Medium Is the Massage” (1966), in Understanding Me (2003), p 86
Year: 1966
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
What do the other media of our time do to the people who use them? Mine is a transformation theory, how people are changed by the instruments they employ.
“Living at the speed of light” (1974), in Understanding Me (2003), p 230
Year: 1974
Chapters:
McLuhanisms & Zingers | Tools We Shape, Reshape Us
↪ Also at #7001
Every business has a huge espionage sector. This is called public relations and audience research, and this...has become the main business of mankind, just watching the other guy.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977), Interview on The Mike McManus Show (TVO), in Understanding Me (2003), pp 267-268
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
Something overlooked by Hans Hass [in The Human Animal] is the absence of biological or psychological means of coping with the effects of our own technical ingenuity in creating new organs. The problem is clearly indicated by Albert Simeons in Man’s Presumptuous Brain, in which he says that ”when about a half million years ago, when man began slowly to embark upon the road to cultural advance, an entirely new situation arose. The use of instruments and the control of fire introduced artifacts in which the cortex could avail itself for purposes of living. These artifacts had no relationship whatever to the organization of the body and could, therefore, not be integrated into the functioning of the brain-stem.”
….. What Simeons is saying is that our natural responses to media and to technology are irrelevant, that we cannot trust our instincts or our natural physical responses to new things. They will destroy us. How are we to bypass or offset merely physical response to new technology and new environments created by new technologies?
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me, (2003), p 284
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Media as Form
The unspoken and even subliminal assumptions in any pattern of human association are dictated by the available means of codifying experience and of moving information. General awareness of this quite drastic fact seems to have departed from literate communities soon after the advent of the phonetic alphabet.
Popular/Mass Culture, Speech, 1960, in Understanding Me (2003), p 17
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Media as Form
It means arranging various media to help each other so they won’t cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity,” The Mike McManus Show, TV Ontario (1977); Transcript, p 4; also in Understanding Me (2003)
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Education | Media Education
↪ Also at #1849
I think one of the things that happens when a new medium comes on the scene is you become aware of the basic characteristics of older media in a way that you were not when they were the only things around. I think we’re becoming more aware now of what print is than we were before. Radio seems to have acquired more sense of its own identity since television, and movies likewise.
“The Communications Revolution” (1960), in Understanding Me (2003), p 35
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Media Reprocess Media
… it would seem natural that older forms [media or technologies] are put to new uses and discover new roles. The book, for example, in our time has discovered many new functions that it never had fifty or a hundred years ago. It has become very powerfully directed toward teaching people how to learn other things besides books [e.g. how-to books], how to learn arts of many kinds. The book has taken on a vast new function as a means of informing people, directing people’s skills in many, many areas.
“The Communications Revolution” (1960), in Understanding Me (2003), p 35
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Media Reprocess Media
In fact, Finnegans Wake is the greatest guide to media ever devised on this planet, and is a tremendous study of the action of all media upon the human psyche and sensorium. It’s difficult to read but it’s worth it.
“Open Mind Surgery,” Lecture at Fordham University (1967), in Understanding Me (2003), p 132
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Media Study
Blake makes quite explicit that when sense ratios change, men change. Sense ratios change when any one sneer or bodily or mental function is externalized in technological form:
The Spectre is the reasoning Power in Man, & when separated
From Imagination and closing itself as in steel in a Ratio
Of the things of Memory, It thence frames Laws & Moralities
To destroy Imagination, the Divine Body, by Martrydoms & Wars.
“Inside Blake and Hollywood”, in Sewanee Review, Vol.55, No.4, October, (1947),p 710; reprinted in McLuhan Unbound (2003), p 6
Year: 1947
The function of music is to translate the sounds of the environment through language, to humanize the technology of the metropolis by translating those sounds in all their raucous disorder, translating them through the rhythms of a great language.
“Art as Survival in the Electric Age” (1973), in Understanding Me (2003), p. 216
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Music
But it's an interesting sidelight or insight to say that the tradition of church music really was a kind of corporate, communal art shared by all, and that bound the community together.
“The Marfleet Lectures”, March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 119
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Music
And this, too, seems to have something to do with the existence of jazz and rock as art forms that, without an oral tradition of corporate public address, this kind of music would not occur.
“TV as a New Mythic Form” (1970), in Understanding Me (2003), p 159
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Music
We're living mythically now. We've continued to think in the old rational patterns of the older technologies. But we are suddenly forced to live in such complex and compressed and high-speed systems that we inevitably switch into mythic patterns.
“The Future of Man in the Electric Age” (1965), in Understanding Me (2003), p 63
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Myth, Mythic
You tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such complex data, moving at very high speeds, so the electric engineers often speak of pattern recognition as a normal need of people processing data electrically and by computers and so on. It´s a need which the poets foresaw a century ago in their drive back to mythic forms of organizing experience.
“The Future of Man in the Electric Age” (1965), in Understanding Me (2003), p 63
Year: 1965
Chapters:
Myth, Mythic | Pattern Recognition
↪ Also at #5305
There is no connection between the items otherwise than the dateline. And if you take away the dateline from any newspaper whatever, you have a quite handsome surrealist poem. It becomes much more enjoyable if you pull the dateline off.
“The medium is the massage” (1966), in Understanding Me (2003), p 82
Year: 1966
Chapter:
News
↪ Also at #5037
…the news has to be a put-on. It has to put on a public, and so the last comic twist in the news would be a way of dismissing the public and saying "so long." You know how in Laugh-In they do it that way. They have a rapid roundup, at the last as a dismissal, of wildly improbable comic turns… I think there are a whole lot of wonderful topics we've managed to broach at least, but it would take a long time to get into them”
“TV News as a New Mythic Form “(Interview with Tom Wolfe), 1970, in Understanding Me (2003), p 171
Year: 1970
Chapter:
News
I think that is one of the functions of news. To blow up a storm so big that you can dissipate it by coverage. It's a way of getting rid of the pressure, by coverage... You can actually dissipate a situation by giving it a maximal coverage...
[Asked about alarming people] Uh, that's done by rumors, not by coverage.
“What TV Does Best” (1976), in Understanding Me (2003), p 244
Year: 1976
Chapter:
News
Paradoxically, when there are many readers, the author can wield great private power, whereas small reading elites may exert large corporate power.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 179
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Paradox
This is a rather startling aspect of the instant replay; you can have the meaning, the structure, minus the experience of the event. And it flips into corporate pattern recognition, which is easily associated with tradition. The instant replay is, perhaps, the most remarkable development of our time, and one of the most profound and metaphysical.
“Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 288
Year: 1979
Chapters:
Pattern Recognition | Replay
↪ Also at #6083
We are now living in a world where all the old pictorial space and all the point-of-view space of visual man are being inundated by the icons and the corporate images of advertising and huge public services.
“Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 294
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Pattern Recognition
At the speed of light the sheer overload of data and information tends to result in 'pattern recognition' - a new form of awareness that discredits previous forms and values: collective amnesia.
“Living at the Speed of Light” (1974), in Understanding Me, 2003, [look up page]
Year: 1974
Chapter:
Pattern Recognition
Our classrooms and our curricula are still modeled on the old industrial environment. They have not come to terms with the electronic age and feedback. What is indicated for the new learning procedures is not the absorption of classified and fragmented data, but pattern recognition with all that that implies of grasping interrelationships. We are actually living out the paradox of having provided cities that are more potent teaching machines than our formal educational system.
“Cybernetics and Human Culture” (1964), in Understanding Me (2003), p 53
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Pattern Recognition
…a need for pattern recognition. It´s a need which the poets foresaw a century ago in their drive back to mythic forms of organizing experience.
“The Future of Man in the Electric Age” (Frank Kermode TV interview,1965), in Understanding Me (2003), p 56
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Pattern Recognition
It is a world in which the vision of Edgar Allan Poe and the work of Sherlock Holmes merge to become a new kind of work. It is a kind of aesthetic work of pattern recognition far removed from the Protestant work ethic of goal-seeking. Today the hunter, the engineer, the programmer, the researcher, and the aesthete are one”
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 199
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Pattern Recognition
The point being, he [the mariner in Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom”] survived by pattern recognition. He perceived the action of the ström, that there were certain recurring objects which recurred and survived. He attaches himself to the recurring objects and survives.
“Art as Survival in the Electric Age” (1973), in Understanding Me (2003), p 212
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Pattern Recognition
At electric speed you have pattern recognition, and this, incidentally, has implications for many, many things, including education and Watergate or politics. The replay reveals meanings.
“Art as Survival in the Electric Age” (1973), in Understanding Me (2003), p 219
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Pattern Recognition
McManus: And still looking for pattern recognition?
McLuhan: It's one of the big excitements of life. It's a sort of detective activity, you know. I do a lot of sleuthing.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity” (TVO appearance, Mike McManus Show, 1977), in Understanding Me (2003), p 264
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Pattern Recognition
But his wit and his politics combined with that dropping of the puritan tendency, but retention of the puritan tone which marked his class and generation, lifted him into a sphere which was utterly opposite to that from which he came.
“The Marfleet Lectures”, March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 107
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Politics and Government
On the other hand, if you make an inventory of all the changes that have taken place in the last twelve, fifteen years since TV, without any preconceptions, without any theories about what television is or what television does, if one merely made an inventory of all the changes in speech, in politics, in habits of human association, habits of reading, habits of dress and food, it might become quite evident that there had been a kind of a pattern of change
“The Medium is the Message” (1966) in Understanding Me (2003), p 90
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Politics and Government
When you put a new medium into play in a given population, all their sensory life shifts
a bit, sometimes shifts a lot. This changes their outlook, their attitudes, changes their feelings about studies, about school, about politics.
“Predicting Communication via the Internet (1966), in Understanding Me (2003), p 100
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Politics and Government
The old and new journalism, corresponding to the old nineteenth-century hardware
and the new electric software and the old and new politics, match these accordingly.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 202
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Politics and Government
The corresponding flip from objective to immersion techniques in politics presents itself in the form of a political shift from parties and policies to images and services.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 203
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Chiasmus, Flips, Reversals | Politics and Government
↪ Also at #1082
The revolution I have been describing in reporting and in politics is the theme of a book called Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 203
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Politics and Government
Well, I don't know I'd call that a prophecy or not. There is a sense in which the separatism [of Quebec from Canada] occurred long ago. But there is a hardware sense in which it is still intact. The country is still intact in a hardware sense, legal sense. It is the hardware that is in danger under electric conditions. The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977), reprinted in Understanding Me, 2003, p 264
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Canada | Predictions
↪ Also at #800
The generations immediately ahead of us will scorn the recent decades and even centuries as periods of triviality, frivolity, and of planned obsolescence.
“The Humanities in the Electronic Age” (1961), in McLuhan Unbound, No. 7 (2003), p 7
Year: 1961
Chapter:
Predictions
The present has become so rich and so complex and terrifying that people do all they can to hide from it.
“Opening lecture, Fordham University” (1967), in Understanding Me (2003), p 141
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Present [The]
↪ Also at #5685
Print, by definition uniform and repeatable, not only created the very concept of “commodity” but made possible markets for such uniform and repeatable commodities. That the operation of the forms and matrices of the print assembly line when extended to all forms of production should also have shaped our attitudes to elite activities is quite natural. In England and America alike the elites have been lotus-eaters, elegant consumers of imported goods simply because a print-oriented world is a consumer world.
“Popular/Mass Culture, Speech” (1960), in Understanding Me (2003), p 15
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Print
Print teaches consumer habits and outlook as well. Print teaches the habit of sequential analysis and of fragmentation of all motion into static units. Print teaches habits of privacy and self-reliance and initiative. It provides a massive visual panorama of the resources of our mother tongue which preliterate people know only by ear. In fact, print is not only access to our culture and technology, it is our culture and technology.
“Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media” (1959), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 3
Year: 1959
↪ Also at #5961
And whereas private, Western man shuns and deplores the invasion of his privacy by the historian or by the psychologist, the tribal or corporate man feels no such reluctance in checking the psychic and social effects of technology.
“The Future of the Book�� (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 177
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Print
Without play, there looms the shadow of madness in private as in corporate life, whence the danger of specialism and bureaucracy when the rigors of classification overlay the relaxed countenance of harmonious faculties.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 191
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Privacy
I suggest that there are no American symphony conductors, Leonard Bernstein having grown up in his early years at least in Vienna, that an American conductor, no matter how much he knows about orchestras or publics, is not able to dramatize himself in the way of putting on the whole orchestra as his private mask or corporate mask, nor is he able to put on the whole public as a mask, whereas a European doesn't even think about this as a problem.
“TV as a New Mythic Form”, 1970, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 168
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Putting On
Of course Johnny must read. He must follow the lines of print. He must roll that hoop down the walk. He must roll his eyes in lineal, sequential fashion. We have only to proceed to engraft the old right-handedness on his new left-handedness in order to win our point. But in the meantime we shall have lost his attention, and he may be subdued, but he will be utterly confused.
“Electronic Revolution” 1959 speech, in Understanding Me (2003), p 3
Year: 1959
↪ Also at #6229
Instant replay enhances awareness of the cognitive process. It obsolesces the representational, the chronological, in that it doesn't matter in what sequence the events occurred.
“Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 288
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Replay
A ball game or a horse race can now be replayed for its meaning, as it were, minus the experience.
“At the Moment of Sputnik” (1974), typescript, p 10; also “Man and Media” (1979) in Understanding Me, (2003), p 277
Year: 1974
Chapter:
Replay
I think now we're playing it backwards. We're going back into the bicameral mind, which is tribal, collective, without any individual consciousness.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity” (Mike McManus Interview, TVO), 1977, in Understanding Me (2003), p 264
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Retribalizing
To the world of the simultaneous and the instantaneous there is no sequence. There is no logic. There is only the simultaneous-instantaneous burst breakthrough. I was once in a plane when it was struck by lightning.
“Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 281
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Simultaneity
In a simultaneous information structure such as the electronic global community, we cannot afford subliminal factors since their operation is haphazard. The simultaneous compels us to make a social order that, like a poem or painting, is totally realized in its interrelations, and in which each factor has total relevance.
“Electronic Revolution” (1959), in Understanding Me (2003), p 9
Year: 1959
Chapter:
Simultaneity
���today, in the electric age, the simultaneous character of information moving at the speed of light assails from all directions simultaneously as we hear from all directions at once.
“Art as Survival in the Electric Age” (1973), in Understanding Me (2003), p 206
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Simultaneity
Literally, there are no goals at the speed of light, but there are roles. At the speed of light, instead of having a job or an objective, you have to determine for yourself a totally new pattern, a new function in the world. And your new function is that of role-playing, which consists in taking on a whole variety of jobs at once. An ordinary mother with a family has many jobs to perform. So does a farmer. We consider them to be role-players. A farmer doesn't have a job and a mother doesn't have a job. They have roles, very involved and complicated ones. Role-playing is the new electronic form of job-holding; it is replacing job-holding. It does require a kind of reallocation of energies. At the speed of light all the old hardware pattern recognition is useless. If you do not know the new pattern in instant replay, you will be unable to make any use of it.
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 293 -294
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Speedups
At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant. That's acoustic, and everything happens at once. There's no continuity, there's no connection, there's no follow-through, it's just all now.”
“What TV Does Best,” (1976), in Understanding Me, (2003), p 246
Year: 1976
Chapters:
Speedups | Simultaneity
↪ Also at #6386
MIKE MCMANUS: The investigations now of the CIA, the FBI, and even our own, God forbid, RCMP, has this anything to do with the electronic age?
MARSHALL MCLUHAN: Well, yes, because we now have the means to keep everyone under surveillance. No matter what part of the world they’re in, we can put them under surveillance. It has become one of the main occupations of mankind, just watching other people and keeping a record of their goings-on. This is the way most businesses are run. Every business has a huge espionage sector. This is called public relations and audience research, and this is around the clock. This has become the main business of mankind, just watching the other guy.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977), Interview on The Mike McManus Show (TVO), trandcript published in Understanding Me (2003), pp 267-268
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Surveillance
↪ Also at #6585
When, in 1896, Bernard Berenson wrote, "The painter can accomplish his task only by giving tactile values to retinal impressions," he was not only very much aboard the impressionist bandwagon, he was advocating the television image. Unlike the movie image, the mosaic mesh of the TV bombards the viewer with tactile values.
“Popular/Mass Culture: American Perspectives” (1960), in Understanding Me (2003), p 17
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Tactile, Touch
Unlike the movie image, the mosaic mesh of the TV bombards the viewer with tactile values.
“Popular / Mass Culture” (1960), in Understanding Me, 2003, p 17
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Tactile, Touch
The need for more and more profound teachers because of the very medium of television is shdowed in the panel show, at least to the extent that it seems more natural, ever since radio, than a single source of comment and information. Two or more teachers in dialogue with each other and with class or audience created exactly that sense of lightl llthrough rather than light on, which is the nature of ht etelevision image or mosaic as c0ompared with movie or print. In the same way with the panel, the voice comes through the audience rather than to the audience.
“Electronic Revolution”, 1959, in Understanding Me (2003), p 10
Year: 1959
Chapter:
Teaching
The telephone and related electrical instruments have rendered the familiar organization patterns as obsolete as the assembly line.
“Popular / Mass Culture,” 1960 speech, in Understanding Me (2003), p 18
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Telephone
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
Chapter:
Television
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
Chapter:
Television
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
Chapter:
Television
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
Chapter:
Television
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
Chapter:
Television
↪ Also at #6790
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
Chapter:
Television
[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
Chapter:
Television
Our most immediate experience of this takeover of individual culture by the corporate and collective vision of tribal man is in our own homes.
“The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 122
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
Most of us here can recall the days when children pushed hoops along sidewalks and roads. … children now nucleate their own space, ballet style… [and] respond with new sensory configurations and new attitudes to their world.
“Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media” (1959), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 2
Year: 1959
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
This process which began with telegraph has reached full proportions with television. Our teenagers assuming the artist outlook have rejected the consumer world. And even in business, as so popular a writer as John Kenneth Galbraith has testified, the old quarrel between art and commerce has ended in a wedding.
“Popular/Mass Culture,” Speech (1960), in Understanding Me (2003), p 15
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
As we move into the world of the simultaneous out of the era of mechanism and of the lineal succession types of analysis, we not only move into the world of the artist, but we see the disappearance of the old oppositions between art and nature, business and culture, school and society. It really does not matter by which phase of our culture today we turn. The habit of simultaneous vision of all phases of process is what characterizes the articulate awareness of the field.
“Electronic Revolution,” (1959), speech, in Understanding Me (2003), pp 4-5
Year: 1959
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
We have never stopped drastically interfering with ourselves by every technology we could latch onto. We have absolutely disrupted our lives over and over again.
“The Future of Man in the Electric Age” (1965) in Understanding Me (2003)
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Tools We Shape, Reshape Us
The typewriter changed the forms of English expression by opening up once more the oral world to the writer of books.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me, 2003, p 175
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Typewriter
Whereas Rousseau in the highly civilized society of the eighteenth century had come to value the integral qualities of primitive life, we have come to understand in detail the operation of those factors that enable civilized values to permeate oral situations.
“The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17 (1967),p 115, reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 103
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Values & Value Judgments
Radical changes of identity happening in very sudden, brief intervals of time have proved more deadly and destructive to human values than were wars fought with hardware weapons.
“Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 286
Year: 1979
Chapters:
Anticipating Change | Dropout | Identity | Living Unity | McLuhanisms & Zingers | Values & Value Judgments | Violence | Warnings
In the electric age the alteration of human identity by new service environments of information have left whole populations without personal or community values to a degree that far exceeds the effects of food and fuel and energy shortages
“Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 286
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Values & Value Judgments
It just means they have completely different characteristics, and the values that are secreted by or brought to us by either form are not necessarily compatible any more
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 297
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Values & Value Judgments
…military action is itself a form of education.
“The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17 1967, reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 132
Year: 1967
Chapter:
War
The result [of accessible Xerox) is that confidential briefing is now beginning to take an oral rather than a written form.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 180
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Xerography
And when we tell the young that this new message is a threat to the old message or medium, we are telling them all we are striving to do in our united social and technical lives is destructive of all they hold dear. The young can only conclude that we are not serious. And this is the meaning of their decline of attention.
“Electronic Revolution,” 1959 speech, in Understanding Me (2003), p 3
Year: 1959
Chapter:
Youth
Their twenty-one-year-old brothers and sisters are a completely different bunch from the fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-olds. Here's an area for research. Nobody ever researched this, but it's wide-open. When people understand that this generation gap is really a technological gap, it will help them to get things in some sort of order again.
First Lecture, Fordham University (1967), in Understanding Me (2003), p 142
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Youth