Marshall McLuhan (21 July 1911 – 31 December 1980) was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. Marshall McLuhan was born on July 21, 1911, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He studied at the University of Manitoba and later pursued graduate studies at Cambridge University and the University of Oxford. McLuhan’s academic journey exposed him to various fields, including literature, culture, and philosophy, which influenced his later work on media and communication.
Famous Marshall McLuhan Quotes
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.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.There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.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.There are many people for whom ‘thinking’ necessarily means identifying with existing trends.We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system.
