McLuhan Aphorisms

Quotes & Aphorisms by the great Marshall McLuhan, the "oracle of the electric age." Musings on culture, technology and metaphysics. b. 1911 d. 1980

[McLuhan Aphorisms @aolo100]

A small percentage of quotes in this feed are taken from Wikiquote

[The McLuhan Institute @McLinstitute]

“Since neolithic times men have regarded their technologies as mere neutral aids to already established activities. The results have been rather like the disappearance of fingers in a buzz saw whose teeth are invisible because of the speed of rotation.”

M McLuhan
1964 speech

[The McLuhan Institute @McLinstitute]

“Sarnoff’s notion that technologies are neutral tools is bunk. Technologies are like cannibals that eat alive all existing populations. The first person to get swallowed is the consumer. There’s nothing neutral about any technology”

McLuhan
Forbes Magazine
March 15, 1967

[Andrey Mir @Andrey4Mir]

Optimists often point to vinyl as proof that obsolete media can rise again.
As a format of media consumption, vinyl is slow and fairly demanding. In this respect, vinyl is remarkably similar to books.
Read the full story:
https://t.co/jSyujQTtkE

[The McLuhan Institute @McLinstitute]

“Yes, the slang thing is of great interest to media students, because every new medium brings a world of slang with it, because slang is after all perception.

Slang is a way of seeing and feeling the world in its more recent development.”

M. McLuhan
w/ Eric McLuhan
1971

[The McLuhan Institute @McLinstitute]

“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

[Andrew McLuhan @amicusadastra]

“Ezra Pound was not the first, and certainly not the only, person to think of poetry as news, but he did say that it is news that stays news.”

Marshall McLuhan
‘Voices of Literature’ I
1964

[Andrew McLuhan @amicusadastra]

“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

[Andrew McLuhan @amicusadastra]

“I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”

Marshall McLuhan
@McLinstitute

[McLuhan Aphorisms @aolo100]

@michaelptoomey Can't listen to college radio anymore because it's all blah blah blah about the DJs' boring lives and interests.

[McLuhan Aphorisms @aolo100]

@EndWokeness drag queens are blackface

[McLuhan Aphorisms @aolo100]

@michaelptoomey Pay them back by shoplifting a Snickers.

[The McLuhan Institute @McLinstitute]

“Every new technology
necessitates a new war.”

Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore
‘War and Peace in the Global Village’
1968

[The McLuhan Institute @McLinstitute]

“Ordinary people live thirty years back
in a state of motivated somnambulism.”

Marshall McLuhan
Letter, May 14, 1969.

[The McLuhan Institute @McLinstitute]

“It is easy to disseminate ideas,
but difficult to train perception.”

Marshall McLuhan
1972

[McLuhan Aphorisms @aolo100]

@PaulLev @KenyonGagne2 It's a good song but it sounds a little incomplete. John and Paul are competent lead guitar and drums, but G & R are missed.

[The McLuhan Institute @McLinstitute]

“They work by dislocation of attention. That is why new styles are necessary for perception. The function of the arts is training in perception. It is not instruction. It is to train your ability to see and use your senses.”

Marshall McLuhan
‘Education in the Electronic Age’
‘67

[The McLuhan Institute @McLinstitute]

“Western man, from Plato to the present, seems to have opted for a transportation theory of communication in which data move, or are moved, from one point to another, leaving both sender and receiver unaltered by this transaction.”

Marshall McLuhan
The Medium is the Message
1973

[McLuhan Aphorisms @aolo100]

@iluminatibot Why do you hate Jews?

[McLuhan Aphorisms @aolo100]

@RpsAgainstTrump He's describing virtually all politicians.

[The McLuhan Institute @McLinstitute]

“As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.”

Marshall McLuhan
‘The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment.’
November 1965