The McLuhan Institute

We’re hosting an afternoon summer session for/with our crew, and you’re invited. On the menu: “…observations, insights, nuggets, probes toward illuminating our tumultuous moment. What is happening? What is happening to us?” Full details: mcluhan.substack.com/p/tmi-presents…

“By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions.” Marshall McLuhan ‘The Gadet Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis’ 1964

“People panic when invited to alter their habitual their habitual ways of seeing, of looking, of hearing, and feeling. They are quite right in supposing that an effort is being made to alter their identity.” Marshall McLuhan, 1972. July 21, 1911 - December 31, 1980

“It is not easy to convince people that I am not dealing with ideas but perceptions. Not concepts but observations. It is easy to disseminate ideas, but difficult to train perception. Marshall McLuhan, 1972. born this day: July 21, 1911 - December 31, 1980

“Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.” Marshall McLuhan ‘The Medium is the Massage’ 1967

"There is a deep-seated repugnance in the human breast against understanding the processes in which we are involved. Such understanding involves far too much responsibility for our actions." Marshall McLuhan letter to Jacques Maritain 6 May 1969.

“Panic about automation as a threat of uniformity on a world scale is the projection into the future of mechanical standardization and specialism, which are now past.” Marshall McLuhan Aspen magazine vol 1, no 4

“Evolution in the arts has always been accomplished instinctively; in business, by trial-and-error; in government, either by conquest or … through a migratory ‘fresh start’ in a locale where no inhibiting bureaucratic or technological backlog exists.” 1969 newsletter draft

“Only those who have learned to perceive the present can predict the future. They need only edit what has happened by being the first to see through pattern recognition. For the future of the future is the present.” Marshall McLuhan ‘Take Today: The Executive as Dropout’ 1970

“Man not only makes his world, he makes himself. He not only makes news, he makes sense. Truth is not a pellet or package but a community of relationships.” Marshall McLuhan ‘Breakdown as Breakthrough’ 1969 (draft)

“The language of a people is not only the resonant bridge that binds them in space and time, it is also the medium that shapes and processes their sensory and mental lives.” Marshall McLuhan ‘Bridges’ 1970

“The Eskimo is the servomechanism of his kayak, the cowboy of his horse, the businessman of his clock, the cyberneticist — and soon the world — of his computer. In short, to the spoils belong the victor.” Marshall McLuhan interviewed in Playboy magazine March 1969

"I'm not suggesting that content plays no role - merely that it plays a distinctively subordinate role." Marshall McLuhan Playboy Magazine, March 1969

“Our new experience belies our old institutions, and unless we become aware of the radical change in our environment and in ourselves, we are in for a tragic clash between the old and the new.” Marshall McLuhan ‘Counterblast’ 1969

“For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumptions on the unwary….But the greatest aid to this end is simply knowing that the spell can occur immediately on contact, as in the first bars of a melody.” Marshall McLuhan ‘The Medium is the Message’ 1964

"The more you know, the more ignorance there is. …a discovery ...doesn't reveal a whole new area of knowledge, it reveals a whole new area of things you don't know about. Ignorance is our biggest natural resource ... and we don't know how to manage that yet." Eric McLuhan 2013

“War is never anything less than accelerated technological change.” Marshall McLuhan 1964

“Every new technology necessitates a new war.” Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore ‘War and Peace in the Global Village’ 1968

“This study offers merely one more testimony that there is finally no way of studying Western society or literature which does not consider, and constantly reconsider, the entire tradition from its Greek inception.” Marshall McLuhan ‘The Place of Thomas Nashe…’ Ph.D., 1943

“...true social and political navigation depend upon anticipating the consequences of innovation.” Marshall McLuhan ‘The medium is the message.’ 1964