Marshall McLuhan Quotes

If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.

I have very complex and complicated ideas about technology. It's such a prominent way that we communicate with each other. In ways, I think it's really positive, and in ways, I think it's really negative.

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations

Technology is rooted in the past. It dominates the present and tends into the future. It is a real historical movement - one of the great movements which shape and represent their epoch.

We were promised a simpler life, and technology has only complicated our lives.

To the small group of editors and designers who would launch Wired in January 1993, technology represented the future's best hope; but to the media, the tech boom was yesterday's story.

With any advent in technology, any technological innovation, there is the good and the bad.

Technology doesn't just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are.

We can trust technology to effect change - that's a given.

I'm ambivalent about tech.

You can't think of technology as separate from all of our human drama anymore.

The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.

Technology by default became the thing that was a new thing that had swept in and was altering it everything.

The entire human race faced a singularity when one small group discovered, ooh, technology. We can live a different way. Eventually, that spelled the death of the old way of life.

Similar to the telescope or the telephone, television enables us to see or hear things we never dreamed of. When you look at the details, a concrete scene between people is really something incredibly unlikely, something subtle that requires extended description.

I think it's the tragedy of our time that we're not aware of the affect of the manner in which we've adopted tools. Those tools have become who we are.

It's true that virtually all new technologies do trigger what sociologists would call 'moral panics,' that there are a lot of people who are concerned with the possible political and social consequences, and that this has been true throughout the ages.

No one has ever been able to stop the process and evolution of technology, not even I.B.M. That is going to continue. Those who grab it and move ahead with it will determine the future in this industry.

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.

I am so inspired by new media.

One of the things you learn operating in the technology industry is disruptions are occurring every day.

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

I don't think that a Singularity would be visible to those going through one. Even the most disruptive changes are not universally or immediately distributed, and late followers learn from the reactions and dilemmas of those who had initially encountered the disruptive change.

Sooner rather than later, any other form other than digital media will be a thing of the past. It won't vanish, but let's face it, this is seemingly the way of the future.

The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.