16 Quotes That Demonstrate The Medium is Still the Message

MarshallMcLuhanMarshall McLuhan would have been 103 today. These days, if you aren’t a heady intellectual, student of the effects of media on the human condition, or remember that quirky cameo in Annie Hall where he tells a pompous professor ‘You know nothing of my work,’ he’s merely a name.  Some of us may know him only by his most famous quote, ‘The medium is the message,’ or as the one who first coined the phrase ‘global village.’ To those of us who grew up in the 60’s and 70’s, he was far more that a ‘pop culture’ icon.  When he spoke we listened, because despite the intensity of his erudite communication theories, he always brought them down to their simplest common denominator – people.  It made him relevant then, and it makes him still relevant today.

 

Social media then meant  telephones, radio, television, print ads, more modern typewriters and printing presses.  Book publishers were thriving as were ad agencies and we witnessed the birth of ‘subliminal’ advertising.

 

Although he passed long before the advent of the technology we have now,  the ‘message’ remains the same, because although the tools have changed, how we use them remains the same. The constant, both then and now remains not society as a whole but the people technology speaks to. That’s us.

 

These 16 quotes prove it:

 

  1. All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
  2. We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
  3.  A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
  4.  As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
  5. The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
  6. 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.
  7.  We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
  8. Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
  9. There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
  10. 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.
  11. Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
  12. I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.
  13. Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
  14. Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
  15. It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
  16. We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.