Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher and media theorist known for his groundbreaking insights into the impact of mass media on society and culture. Through works such as "Understanding Media" and "The Medium is the Massage," McLuhan explored the ways in which technology shapes human consciousness and communication. His concepts, such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message," continue to influence scholars and thinkers in fields ranging from sociology to digital studies.
"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."
"The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology."
"The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare."
"In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness."
"All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values."
"If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch."
"Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression."
"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding."
"Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior."
"The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village."
"Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness."
"It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame."
"The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way."
"Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities."