Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

Whether one likes it or not, the screen is a profoundly important source of imagery and storytelling for this generation. For me, books remain a stunning place to tell stories, but the screen has a place.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

As technology has improved, our digital lives have only grown more tangled and cluttered.

Cell phones, mobile e-mail, and all the other cool and slick gadgets can cause massive losses in our creative output and overall productivity.

There are more clocks than ever - clocks on computers, on cell phones, on televisions, on any screen available, telling time to the digital second - but they all seem to matter less.

Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society.

It is now such a complex society in terms of media. It just comes at us from every direction. You kind of have to push it all away.

We're exposed to ideas everywhere. The world is full of ideas. I think that television is a pretty powerful medium in that regard.

The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.

I don't know about you, but all this modern technology that's supposed to save us time and effort has actually ended up making things more complicated in my life, eating up extra time.

Television has changed the American child from an irresistable force to an immovable object.

The masters of the new technologies cannot master the power of politics, even if they were right to challenge the current deep dysfunction of the U. S. Political system.

Kids are growing up with a bombardment of information through technology.

Humans will always babble. If someone wants to tweet that they can't decide whether to wear blue socks or brown socks, then fair enough. But when sharing becomes automated, I get the heebie-jeebies.

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

HOBBES: All this modern technology just makes people try to do everything at once.

Life gradually becomes a surrender to situations conditioned by technology.

It's difficult to keep anything fresh for an audience these days. With technology being what it is people seem to know everything there is to know about a film before you've even made it.

Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.

I do think American culture has shifted a little bit away from the contemplative more toward the visual, more toward the emotional, and more toward the expressive. I don't think there's a lot that can be done about that. We just have to understand that it's the product of technology and of the way people live now.

I worry that as the problem-solving power of our technologies increases, our ability to distinguish between important and trivial or even non-existent problems diminishes.

I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’.

Given any new technology for transmitting information, we seem bound to use it for great quantities of small talk. We are only saved by music from being overwhelmed by nonsense.

What's really baffling to me is the way that the technology has risen up to help us become more materialistic.