Today, the instantaneous world of electric information media involves all of us, all at once. Ours is a brand new world of all-at-onceness. Time, in a sense, has ceased and space has vanished. Like primitives, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. The global village is not created by the motor car or even by the airplane. It is created by instant electronic information movement. The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as the little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose into everybody else’s business. The global village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony; you have extreme concern with every else’s business and much involvement in everybody else’s life. It’s a sort of Ann Landers column written larger. And it doesn’t necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet, but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else’s affairs. And so, the global village is as big as a planet and as small as the village post office.

                  We now share too much about each other to be strangers to each other. For example, in the age of the information explosion, all the walls go out between age-groups, between family groups, national groups, between economies. The walls all go out. People suddenly have to adjust themselves to this new proximity, this new interrelationship, and merely to tell them that this has happened isn’t very helpful. What they need to know is, if it is happening, what does it mean to me?

“McLuhan on McLuhanism,” WNDT Educational Broadcasting Network, 1966

Any medium presents a figure whose ground is always hidden or subliminal. In the case of TV, as of the telephone and radio, the subliminal ground could be called the disincarnate or disembodied user. This is to say that when you are “on the telephone” or “on the air”, you do not have a physical body. In these media, the sender is sent and is instantaneously present everywhere. The disembodied user extends to all those who are recipients of electric information. It is these people who constitute the mass audience, because mass is a factor of speed rather than quantity, although popular speech permits the term mass to be used with large publics.

“A Last Look at the Tube”, New York magazine, 1978

The violence that all electric media inflict in their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their physical bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if this were not sufficient violence or invasion of individual rights, the elimination of the physical bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating the program experience of their private, individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity.

                  The loss of individual and personal meaning via the electronic media ensures a corresponding and reciprocal violence from those so deprived of their identities; for violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.

“Violence of the Media”, Canadian Forum, 1976

The psychiatrist’s couches of the world are sagging with people who have lost their sense of identity. They used to feel they were clearly defined entities; they had cards of identity, they knew who they were. Now they go to psychiatrists to be told or to find out, “Who am I? What should I be doing?”

“Take Thirty”, CBC Television, 1965

In the eighties, as we transfer our whole being to the data bank, privacy will become a ghost or echo of its former self and what remains of community will disappear.

“Living at the Speed of Light”, Maclean’s magazine, 1980

Everybody at a football game is nobody simply by virtue of the fact of their deep involvement in an experience simultaneously shared by many others. In such a situation, the most famous person in the world becomes a nobody. This is a structural fact, and when considered in relation to our wired planet, where everybody is involved in everybody’s experience, this is the overwhelming backlash of reduction to nonentity – the creation of mass man. The mass man is not the vulgar or the stupid or the unthinking man, but anybody and everybody who experiences the electric situation of instant information.

                  Electronic man is no abstraction, but rather the existing individual in a simultaneous culture. Having had his private individuality erased anonymously, he is paranoiac and much inclined to violence, for violence is a quest for identity, seeking to discover, “Who am I?” and “What are my limits?”

Speech at the Conference on Management Information Systems, 1971

The telephone: speech without walls.

The phonograph: music hall without walls.

The photograph: museum without walls.

The electric light: space without walls.

The movie, radio, and TV: classroom without walls.

Understanding Media, 1964

I have insisted that any new structure for codifying experience and moving information, be it alphabet or photography, has the power of imposing its structural character and assumptions upon all levels of our private and social lives – even without the benefit of concepts or of conscious acceptance…. That is what I’ve always meant by “the medium is the message”.

Interview by Thomas P. McDonnell, U.S. Catholic, 1966

The printing press was the ultimate extension of phonetic literacy. Books could be reproduced in infinite numbers; universal literacy was at last fully possible, if gradually realized; and books became portable individual possessions. Type, the prototype of all machines, ensured the primacy of the visual bias and finally sealed the doom of tribal man. The new medium of linear, uniform, repeatable type produced information in unlimited quantities and at hitherto impossible speeds, thus assuring the eye a position of total predominance in man’s sensorium. As a drastic extension of man, it shaped and transformed his entire environment, psychic and social, and was directly responsible for the rise such disparate phenomena as nationalism, the Reformation, the assembly line, and its offspring, the Industrial Revolution.

Interview by Eric Norden, Playboy, 1969

I would suggest that if you were to put the TV in the classroom, it would blow the classroom to bits. The teaching processes would be completely transformed: it would be exactly like bringing the Trojan horse inside the walls of Troy. It would not be an incidental teaching aid, it would simply alter the entire pattern and procedures of the classroom and create an altogether new educational form. However, this has, in effect, happened since TV is already the environmental force that is shaping the awareness and outlook of children everywhere. It is already doing this anyway, so whether it goes into the classroom or not is really not a great issue.

Take Thirty, CBC Television, 1965

All situations are composed of an area of attention [figure] and a very much larger (subliminal) area of inattention [ground] ….Figures rise out of, and recede back into, ground….for example, at a lecture, the attention will shift from the speaker’s words to his gestures, to the hum of the lighting or street sounds, or to the feel of the chair or a memory or association or smell, each new figure alternatively displaces the others into ground…The ground of any technology is both the situation that gives rise to it as well as the whole environment (medium) of services and disservices that the technology brings with it. These are side effects and impose themselves willy-nilly as a new form of culture. The medium is the message.

Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media, 1968

We may be approaching the time when political and executive figures may have to be recruited on the same basis as was formerly used for movie stars. Alternatively, it might be possible to transfer the Paul Newmans or the John Waynes from the entertainment sphere to the political sphere directly in order to satisfy the need of people to be reassured by images that remind them of all the people they might have been in some ideal existence.

unpublished essay, 1974