A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the servo-mechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his clock.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 46
Year: 1964
↪ Also at #4488, #7019
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan