Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CCwas a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. He was educated at the University of Manitoba and Cambridge University and began his teaching career as a Professor of English at several universities in the U.S. and Canada, before moving to the University of Toronto where he would remain for the...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 July 1911
CityEdmonton, Canada
CountryCanada
What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.
On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers; everybody is a member of the crew. We have moved into an age in which everybody's activities affect everybody else.
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
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.
In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.
In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved.
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
The age of automation is going to be the age of "do it yourself".
As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'
The electric age ... established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system.
Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials