Understanding Media Quotes

“The medium is the message.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Art is anything you can get away with.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism. ”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experi­ence, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numb­ness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.

Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any ma­terial other than themselves. There have been cynics who insisted that men fall deep­est in love with women who give them back their own image. Be that as it may, the wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself. It is, perhaps, indicative of the bias of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus!”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: “We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience. Subrational beings have no means of achieving such a ratio or proportion in their sense lives but are wired for fixed wave lengths, as it were, having infallibility in their own area of experience. Consciousness, complex and subtle, can be impaired or ended by a mere stepping-up or dimming-down of any one sense intensity, which is the procedure in hypnosis. And the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Delegated authority is lineal, visual, hierarchical. The authority of knowledge is nonlineal, nonvisual, and inclusive.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“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, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“War and the fear of war have always been considered the main incentives to technological extension of our bodies. Indeed, Lewis Mumford, in his The City in History, considers the walled city itself an extension of our skins, as much as housing and clothing. More even than the preparation for war, the aftermath of invasion is a rich technological period; because the subject culture has to adjust all its sense ratios to accommodate the impact of the invading culture.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“In the age of instant information man ends his job of fragmented specializing and assumes the role of information-gathering. Today information-gathering resumes the inclusive concept of “culture” exactly as the primitive food-gatherer worked in complete equilibrium with his entire environment. Our quarry now, in this new nomadic and “workless” world, is knowledge and insight into the creative processes of life and society.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Jack Paar mentioned that he once had said to a young friend, “Why do you kids use ‘cool’ to mean ‘hot’?” The friend replied, “Because you folks used up the word ‘hot’ before we came along.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Why? The answer is central to any understanding of media. Why does a child like to chatter about the events of its day, however jerkily? Why do we prefer novels and movies about familiar scenes and characters? Because for rational beings to see or re-cognize their experience in a new material form is an unbought grace of life. Experience translated into a new medium literally bestows a delightful playback of earlier awareness. The press repeats the excitement we have in using our wits, and by using our wits we can translate the outer world into the fabric of our own beings.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The same nursery rhyme comments on the consequences of the fall of Humpty-Dumpty. That is the point about the King’s horses and men. They, too, are fragmented and specialized. Having no unified vision of the whole, they are helpless. Humpty-Dumpty is an obvious example of integral wholeness. The mere existence of the wall already spelt his fall. James Joyce in Finnegans Wake never ceases to interlace these themes, and the title of the work indicates his awareness that “a-stone-aging” as it may be, the electric age is recovering the unity of plastic and iconic space, and is putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Humpty-Dumpty is the familiar example of the clown unsuccessfully imitating the acrobat. Just because all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty-Dumpty together again, it doesn’t follow that electromagnetic automation couldn’t have put Humpty-Dumpty back together. The integral and unified egg had no business sitting on a wall anyway. Walls are made of uniformly fragmented bricks that arise with specialisms and bureaucracies. They are the deadly enemies of integral beings like eggs. Humpty-Dumpty met the challenge of the wall with a spectacular collapse.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Satire,” said Swift, “is a glass in which we see every countenance but our own.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“… my father thought the whole idea was absurd. He refused to identify the stream he had crossed at Bomako, where it is no deeper, he said, than a man is high, with the great widespread waters of the vast Niger delta. Distances as measured in miles had no meaning for him … Maps are liars, he told me briefly. From his tone of voice I could tell that I had offended him in some way not known to me at the time. The things that hurt one do not show on a map. The truth of a place is in the joy and the hurt that come from it. I had best not put my trust in anything as inadequate as a map, he counseled … I understand now, although I did not at the time, that my airy and easy sweep of map-traced staggering distances belittled the journeys he had measured on tired feet. With my big map-talk, I had effaced the magnitude of his cargo-laden, heat-weighted treks.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“In modern thought, (if not in fact)
Nothing is that doesn’t act,
So that is reckoned wisdom which
Describes the scratch but not the itch.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“For the fragmented man creates the homogenized Western world, while oral societies are made up of people differentiated, not by their specialist skills or visible marks, but by their unique emotional mixes.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The alphabet (and its extension into typography) made possible the spread of the power that is knowledge, and shattered the bonds of tribal man, thus exploding him into an agglomeration of individuals. Electric writing and speed pour upon him, instantaneously and continuously, the concerns of all other men. He becomes tribal once more. The human family becomes one tribe again.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“every kind of entertainment in the TV age favors the same kind of personal involvement. Hence the paradox that, in the TV age, Johnny can’t read because reading, as customarily taught, is too superficial and consumerlike an activity. Therefore the highbrow paperback, because of its depth character, may appeal to youngsters who spurn ordinary narrative offerings. Teachers today frequently find that students who can’t read a page of history are becoming experts in code and linguistic analysis. The problem, therefore, is not that Johnny can’t read, but that, in an age of depth involvement, Johnny can’t visualize distant goals.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his paleolithic ancestors.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The car, in a word, has quite refashioned all of the spaces that unite and separate men, and it will continue to do so for a decade more, by which time the electronic successors to the car will be manifest.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“This is the story of the motorcar, and it has not much longer to run. The tide of taste and tolerance has turned, since TV, to make the hot-car medium increasingly tiresome. Witness the portent of the crosswalk, where the small child has power to stop a cement truck. The same change has rendered the big city unbearable to many who would no more have felt that way ten years ago than they could have enjoyed reading MAD.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man