My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

Marshall McLuhan

Categorized in : Years Age Technology

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

Marshall McLuhan

division military war

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.

Marshall McLuhan

psychics media political

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. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.

Marshall McLuhan

eye rights giving

People hope that if they scream loudly enough about "values" then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.

Marshall McLuhan

soul mistake people

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.

Marshall McLuhan

arbitrary media perception

We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.

Marshall McLuhan

involved robots technology

The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.

Marshall McLuhan

greatness odds attitude

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

Marshall McLuhan

monopoly computer done

Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be so much more powerful than he could ever be.

Marshall McLuhan

political powerful success

The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.

Marshall McLuhan

media community culture

As a rule, I always look for what others ignore.

Marshall McLuhan

looks

Time’ has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village... a simultaneous happening

Marshall McLuhan

simultaneous village space

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

Marshall McLuhan

shapes tools

Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.

Marshall McLuhan

mass speed men

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

Marshall McLuhan

patterns alternatives information

The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it's an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.

Marshall McLuhan

hula technology men

Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.

Marshall McLuhan

secret evil needs

What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.

Marshall McLuhan

age littles men

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

Marshall McLuhan

business discovery science

Like primitive, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. It doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs.

Marshall McLuhan

village doe mean