The McLuhan Institute
@McLinstitute
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TMI: making sense. Home of McLuhan studies in the McLuhan tradition since 2017
Prince Edward County, Ontario
Joined December 2017
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The point of the Narcissus myth is not that people are prone to fall in love with their own images, but that people fall in love with extensions of themselves which they are convinced are not extensions of themselves.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘The Agenbite of Outwit’
1963
15
208
1K
“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.”
Marshall McLuhan
1964
17
210
714
“The really great privilege of the elites of the future will be to erase the computer information about them, and assume their private identities again.”
Marshall McLuhan
1969
7
100
395
“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”
Marshall McLuhan
1964
3
98
391
“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.”
Marshall McLuhan
1964
5
116
384
“It's vital to adopt a posture of arrogant superiority; instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes.”
Marshall McLuhan
1969
3
65
292
“Today he [Archimedes] would have pointed to our electric media and said
‘I will stand on your eyes, your ears, your nerves, and your brain, and the world will move in any tempo I choose.’
We have leased these ‘places to stand’ to private corporations.”
Marshall McLuhan
1964
4
48
227
“Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis’ 1964
3
55
188
“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior, especially in collective matters of media and technology, where the individual is almost inevitably unaware of their effects upon him.”
McLuhan
1964
3
66
188
“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.
All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Understanding Media’
1964
3
43
166
“in the electronic age,
technology is total.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Big Transistor is watching you.’
1965
2
57
165
“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior, especially in collective matters of media and technology, where the individual is almost inevitably unaware of their effects upon him.”
McLuhan
1964
1
46
151
“When the new form swallows the older form, there is a natural confusion of scales and images during the process of translating the old into the new.
During this process the culture seems to enter a phase of fantasy and unreality.”
Marshall McLuhan
New Media and the Arts
1964
6
40
152
“... on the air, you do not have a physical body. All you have is an abstract image. ... When you have no relation to natural law, or, that is, no physical being, what happens to your identity?”
Marshall McLuhan,
October 14 1978
3
46
150
“Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all.
Making sense is still a human monopoly.”
Marshall McLuhan +
Barrington Nevitt
‘Take Today: The Executive as Dropout’
1970
4
38
146
“Our communication technology is advancing faster than man’s ability to understand its effects…
we have built our communications hardware without figuring what to do with the excess information now overloading us and causing stress within our human systems.”
circa 1979
1
58
148
“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Challenge and Collapse: The Nemesis of Creativity’
1
46
144
“Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.”
Marshall McLuhan +
Barrington Nevitt
‘Take Today: The Executive as Dropout’
1970
2
23
140
“By electric speeds we have created a global village and can move information faster around the world than across a room, and transformed ourselves, not into global citizens, but into global yokels of the most apathetic and zombie-eyed variety.”
Marshall McLuhan
Jan. 6, 1961
Marshall McLuhan did not mean "the global village" as a necessarily good thing. At the limit, the entire connected world becomes an orality-based gossip-driven small town. See also "longhouse".
44
102
1K
0
48
140
“…many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object now. And to generate heat not light is the intention.
Marshall McLuhan
1951
4
49
136
“People panic when invited to alter their habitual ways of seeing, of looking, of hearing, and feeling. They are quite right in supposing that an effort is being made to alter their identity.”
Marshall McLuhan
Financial Times of Canada
September 11, 1972
2
29
133
“Those engaged in teaching ‘Media Literacy’ and other media-training courses are actually in the business of peddling toxic and addictive things to näive new users—addicts-to-be.”
Eric McLuhan
‘Media Ecology in the 21st Century.’
2018
4
18
125
“The message of our new electric media is subliminal and total in its effects on our sensibilities, on our social and political lives.
Control of this area depends on raising the subliminal to conscious articulate levels.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘The Concept of Communication’
1959
1
52
127
“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.
All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Understanding Media’
1964
3
38
122
“Whether it be possible to retain the fruits of literacy without the soil and tree of literacy would appear to be the test we are now undergoing in the Western world.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘The Medium is the Message’
‘Forum’ magazine
1960
3
37
121
Babin: “As a Christian, have you examined the effects that [media] have on the church… on faith?”
McLuhan: “I would prefer that most questions of that sort be dealt with by theologians, but they do not seem to be interested.”
1977
5
22
118
“In the future those who pay cash will suffer a high velocity loss of identity by being tied to hardware in an essentially software environment.”
Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers
‘Electronic Banking and the Death of Privacy’
1980
3
24
108
“The evolutionary process has shifted from biology to technology…
Each extension of ourselves creates a new human environment and an entirely new set of interpersonal relationships. The[y]… saturate our sensoria and are thus invisible.”
Marshall McLuhan
1969
5
32
111
“In the course of doing this work, I discovered what’s wrong with the Shannon-Weaver model of communication. What they call ‘NOISE,’ I call the medium—that is all the side-effects, all the unintended patterns and changes.”
McLuhan to Agel
letter, March 26, 1976
2
23
106
“It seems necessary in a world where everything happens at once and in which the daily environment is alive with messages and meaning that the training of perception becomes the necessary work of any school.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Education in the Electronic Age’
1967
3
32
107
“Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.”
McLuhan / Fiore
‘The Medium is the Massage: an inventory of effects.’
1967
4
48
107
“Whenever we create a new technology, that creates a new environment which we automatically assume as our cultural mask.
We do this via our senses, not our concepts.
Each new environment creates a new body percept, new outlook and new inlook.”
McLuhan
1966, to
Peter Drucker
2
38
106
“Here is another thought for you that is very controversial. I don’t see any point in making anything but controversial statements... I mean you cannot get people thinking until you say something that really shocks them, dislocates them.
Marshall McLuhan
1967 speech
1
20
102
“So the computer, although it is sternly dedicated to the task of doing 19th century librarian work, has, in spite of itself, revealed the knowledge of mythic pattern, structure, and profile, all of which are quite excitedly loaded with discovery.”
Marshall McLuhan
1966
1
18
94
"There is a deep-seated repugnance in the human breast against understanding the processes in which we are involved.
Such understanding involves far too much responsibility for our actions."
Marshall McLuhan
letter to Jacques Maritain
May 6, 1969.
3
31
102
“The fact that the medium is the message in no way detracts from the correlative fact that the user is the content.
… the medium is almost entirely subliminal in its action.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘The Medium Is The Message’
1973
1
27
100
“Joyce was probably the only man ever to discover that all social changes are the effect of new technologies (self-amputations of our own being) on the order of our sensory lives.”
Marshall McLuhan
as quoted in ‘Joyce and McLuhan’ by Eric McLuhan (1996, 2011)
1
25
94
"For discarnate man, the only political regime that is reasonable or in touch with him is totalitarian —
the state becomes religion."
Marshall McLuhan,
"Last Look at the Tube,"
New York Magazine, March 17, 1978
3
33
94
“I think of the moralist as a person terrified by his own intellectual inadequacy to perceive anything. He hope that by putting on a display of vehement feeling to conceal his mental defects.”
Marshall McLuhan
to The Diebold Group, Inc.
1966
0
9
87
“Personally, having found the utmost ambiguity in all human technologies, and having never discovered a fixed position from which to view or measure them, I have settled for studying their on-going effects on their users.”
Marshall McLuhan
1973 essay on Lewis Mumford
2
21
93
1/22/73 — 1/22/22
49 years later, recordings of Monday Night Seminars to be made available beginning this Saturday.
1
13
86
“The language and grammar of a medium have nothing to do with its content or programming.”
“The study of media constituents and contents can never reveal the dynamics of media effects.”
Marshall McLuhan
1960 report to the NAEB
3
22
92
“Any speed-up of information or of hardware alters the intervals of time and space between people and events.”
Marshall McLuhan
The McLuhan DEW-LINE
1:5, November 1968
6
25
92
“We can, if we choose, think things out
before we put them out.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Understanding Media:
The Extensions of Man’
1964
2
25
87
“Movies in America have not developed advertising intervals simply because the movie itself is the greatest of all forms of advertisement for consumer goods.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’
1964 (2003; p.279)
0
19
81
“When all the available resources and energies have been played up in an organism or in any structure there is some kind of reversal of pattern.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.’
1964
“When technologies are pushed to their extremes they suddenly have opposite characteristics”—Marshal McLuhan, 1965
21
58
225
2
20
85
“You’ve got to remember that my definition of media is broad; it includes any technology whatever that creates extensions of the human body and senses, from clothing to the computer.”
Marshall McLuhan
in ‘Playboy’ magazine
1969
4
6
86
“There are no more jobs — only roles. That’s why people can’t fit into organizations anymore. This is the reason for all the strikes around the world as jobs dissolve into roles.”
Marshall McLuhan
interviewed by Catherine Court
in ‘Rags’ October 1970
3
26
87
“Nothing has its meaning alone… A single word, divorced of its linguistic ground, would be useless. A note in isolation is not music. … The meaning of meaning is relationship.”
McLuhan and Nevitt
‘Take Today: The Executive as Dropout’
1972
0
16
86
“I have been forced to observe that most of the effects of any innovation occur before the actual innovation itself.
In a word, a vortex of effects tends, in time, to become the innovation.”
Marshall McLuhan
1971 letter to
Muriel Bradbrook
3
10
84
“It seems necessary in a world where everything happens at once and in which the daily environment is alive with messages and meaning that the training of perception becomes the necessary work of any school.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Education in the Electronic Age’
1967
1
24
85
“New art is the survival chart for relevance amidst the technological changes that incessantly distort and junk our existing sensory patterns.”
Marshall McLuhan
February 28, 1973
0
26
83
“People panic when invited to alter their habitual ways of seeing, of looking, of hearing, and feeling. They are quite right in supposing that an effort is being made to alter their identity.”
Marshall McLuhan
Financial Times of Canada
September 11, 1972
1
15
81
When people ‘discover’ McLuhan.
In 1966, media futurist Marshall McLuhan envisioned a form of digital research eerily similar to the customized queries now answered by AI. Then he makes a surprising admission about why he studies technological change—with a lesson I think many need to hear.
72
593
2K
3
17
78
“The natural logic of the computer speed is decentralism and uniqueness of involvement.
The immediate potential of the computer is to bring back the cottage industries of the Middle Ages, now making it possible to run gigantic operations from a private kitchen…”
McLuhan
1970
3
25
80
“The artist is the only person whose antennae pick up messages before everyone else. So he is always thought of being way ahead of his time because he lives in the present.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘The Global Theatre’
Ekistics 32/190
1971
0
10
72
“The fact that literate adults in our world have very simple-minded ideas about media does not prevent these media from having very complex results on psyche and society.”
Marshall McLuhan
letter to Bascom St John
July 10, 1964
2
19
74
“In this electric age, we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Media as Translators’
1964
2
20
76
“If technology creates environments that brain-wash man, art creates anti-environments that heighten consciousness.”
Marshall McLuhan
review of ‘Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman,’
1965
2
27
75
“The effect of extending the central nervous system is not to create a world-wide city of ever expanding dimensions, but rather a global village of ever contracting size.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘The Global Village’
Typescript, c.1963
4
23
74
"You see, I'm a sleuth, a kind of Sherlock Holmes character who simply investigates the environment and reports exactly what he sees. Strangely enough, some people are actually frightened by me. I find the whole explorations of the environment very exciting.”
McLuhan
1976
1
12
75
“Going along with the total and, perhaps, motivated ignorance of man-made environments, is the failure of philosophers and psychologists in general to notice that our senses are not passive receptors of experience.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Identity, Technology, and War’
1970
2
21
75
“We now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art designed to maximize perception and to make everyday learning a process of discovery.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘for Dot Zero Magazine’
tss, 1964
1
12
71
“It is obvious that the user or content of any medium is completely conformed to the character of this man-made environment. His entire sensory life arranges its hierarchies and dominance in accordance with the environment in which he operates."
Marshall McLuhan
1970
1
17
66
“Perhaps we could sum up our problem by saying that technological man must betake himself to visual metaphor in contriving a new unified language for the multiverse of culture of the entire globe.
Marshall McLuhan
‘Culture Without Literacy’
1953
2
18
72
Today we remember Marshall McLuhan’s closest colleague, his eldest son Eric. No one worked harder to preserve and continue the work.
Thomas Eric Marshall McLuhan
January 19 1942 - May 18 2018
1
6
70
‘I have never been an optimist or a pessimist. I’m an apocalyptic only,” Marshall McLuhan said during a 1977 interview. “Apocalypse is not gloom,” he added. “It’s salvation.”
Nick Ripatrazone,
author of ‘Digital Communion: Marshall McLuhan's Spiritual Vision for a Virtual Age’
1
18
70
“Whether it be possible to retain the fruits of literacy without the soil and tree of literacy would appear to be the test we are now undergoing in the Western world.”
Marshall McLuhan
Address to NAEB
1959
0
17
69
“When you live in an information age, culture becomes big business and the cultural explosion or the information explosion becomes itself cultured. It knocks down all the walls between culture and business.”
Marshall McLuhan
interviewed by Harry Boyle
1967
0
25
71
“The future is here now. The teacher of the future is always the present and it is very difficult to look at the present. Everything that is going to happen in 10 or 20 years is happening now, right under our noses.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Education in the Electronic Age’
1967
1
16
69
“By electric speeds we have created a global village and can move information faster around the world than across a room, and transformed ourselves, not into global citizens, but into global yokels of the most apathetic and zombie-eyed variety.”
Marshall McLuhan
Jan. 6, 1961
1
20
69
“I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me.”
Marshall McLuhan
1966
0
26
69
“New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.
This degradation happens when new media inevitably use older ones as content.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘New Media and the Arts’
1964
1
16
69
“…when our new technology encompasses any culture or society, the result is propaganda. All societies become the program content of electric technology, and all societies become propagandistic as a result.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Big Transistor is watching you.’
1965
2
26
69
“The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Big Transistor is watching you.’
1965
1
18
69
“We need new perceptions to cope.
Our technologies are generations ahead of our thinking.
If you even begin to think about these new technologies you appear as a poet because you are dealing with the present as the future.
That is my technique.”
Marshall McLuhan
1967
2
18
67
“Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns of information.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘The medium is the message’
1964
0
16
68
“It’s misleading to suppose there’s any basic difference between education and entertainment.
The distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Classroom Without Walls’
Explorations
#7
1957
2
15
65
“Wedded as they are to nineteenth-century industrial technology as the basis of class liberation, nothing could be more subversive of the Marxian dialectic than the idea that linguistic media shape social development, as much as do the means of production.”
Marshall McLuhan
1964
0
15
65
“A perpetual source of joy in ordinary experience and consciousness is in the power of the mind to discern pattern and form amidst the utmost confusion of data.”
Marshall McLuhan
February 28, 1973
0
11
67
“Meaning is effect of medium on user.”
Marshall McLuhan
annotation in a copy of
‘ABC of Reading’ by Ezra Pound
1
13
67
“Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions.
The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act - the way we perceive the world.
When these ratios change, men change.”
Marshall McLuhan
w/ Quentin Fiore
1967
📷 Jacob Sager
1
14
66
“Perhaps the terrifying thing about the new media for most of us is their inevitable evocation of irrational response. The irrational has become the major dimension of experience in our world.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Culture Without Literacy’
in ‘Explorations 1’
1953
2
24
65
“Any culture is an order of sensory preferences.”
Marshall McLuhan
in ‘Playboy’ magazine
1969
1
18
67
“The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers’
-Marshall McLuhan
‘Who gave you that numb?’
-James Joyce
0
6
60
“Whether it be possible to retain the fruits of literacy without the soil and tree of literacy would appear to be the test we are now undergoing in the Western world.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘The Medium is the Message’
‘Forum’ magazine
1960
5
14
65
“All technological extensions of ourselves must be numb and subliminal, else we could not endure the leverage exerted upon us by such extension.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Understanding Media’
1964
1
22
65
Postman: “I don’t see any point in studying media unless one does so within a moral or ethical context.”
-quoted by E.M. Griffin
McLuhan: “A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.”
-‘Understanding Media’ 1964
2
7
65
“The great privilege of the elites of the future will be to erase the computer information about them and assume their private identity again.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘The McLuhan DEW-LINE’ newsletter
2
19
62
“The environments set up by different media are not just containers for people; they are the processes which shape people.
There is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”
Marshall McLuhan
in ‘Saturday Review’
March 18, 1967
0
21
65
“The modern world of dynamics is an all-at-once world in which there cannot be single levels or one-thing-at-a-time awareness.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘The medium is the message’
1960
0
13
63
“We need to consider that the artists are not recording a private world of their own, but rather that they are articulating the world in which we are all living but in which very few of us can think or feel.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Grammars for the Newer Media’
1960
0
9
57
“Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control, is the object now.”
Marshall McLuhan
1951
1
14
60
“The new media by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Challenge and Collapse: The Nemesis of Creativity.”
1964
0
19
61
“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Culture Is Our Business’
1970
2
24
58
If the student … will but meditate on the power of … electric light to transform every structure of time and space and work and society that it penetrates or contacts, he will have the key to the form of the power that is in all media to reshape any lives that they touch.
1964
1
24
62
“If the medium is the message, the user is the content.”
Marshall McLuhan
letter to the editor of
‘The Listener’
August 11, 1971
0
12
58
“We have not returned to the middle ages— they have returned to us.”
Marshall McLuhan
1971
0
17
61
“Our communication technology is advancing faster than man’s ability to understand its effects… we have built our communications hardware without figuring what to do with the excess information now overloading us and causing stress within our human systems.”
MM and GG
c. 1979
0
26
60
“I think that our chances both of survival and enrichment depend upon noticing what’s going on, not by looking back at some better state or forward to some better state, but very carefully studying the potential of the immediate situation in which we exist.”
M. McLuhan
1966 q+a
1
12
58