Black and white photo of Marshall McLuhan. He is an older white man with wavy hair. He has his chin resting in his palm, and he wears a dark woolen jacket
Social Science Quotes

Marshall McLuhan

When any new form comes into the foreground of things, we naturally look at it through the old stereos. We can’t help that. This is normal, and we’re still trying to see how will our previous forms of political and educational patterns persist under television. We’re just trying to fit the old things into the new form, instead of asking what is the new form going to do to all the assumptions we had before.

Marshall McLuhan
Infographic of retro technology, including black and white TV, printing press, 1990s computer, manual camera, gameboy, ipod, stack of newspapers, and a man typing on a laptop on ChatGPT. On the right is a quote from Marshall McLuhan on new forms of technology

This quote is from an 1960 TV interview (below). McLuhan is talking about the impact of television.

McLuhan famously also said that the “medium is the message,” meaning that the medium, or technology format, has broader ramifications than its content or use. He argued: “We shape our tools, and thereafter, our tools shape us.”

He later went on to argue that new technology intensifies or enhances the world, that this technology will also make other forms of communication obsolete, while taking on attributes of the past, or otherwise become a caricature.