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The Book of Probes
Until now, no book has explored the full expanse of Marshall McLuhan's thinking. Here we have assembled alongside his most prescient aphorisms excerpts from the full range of his astounding life's work. One revolutionary book distills the wisdom and wit of the man who explained to us the "the medium is the message" and that we are "now living in a global village", that "privacy invasion is now our most important knowledge industry" and that "obsolescence is the moment of superabundance". Cover to cover, Anthology is not only one hundred percent McLuhan's own words, these are McLuhan's finest words. McLuhan called these bold perceptions probes and today they gleam like gems embedded everywhere in his life's output - in his books, in more than 200 speeches, in his classes (especially the Monday Night Seminars), and most of all in the nearly 700 shorter writings that he published between 1945 and 1980. In recent years, his son Eric McLuhan and William Kuhns have combed through all these sources to compile and edit what has become Anthology - The Book of Probes. The collection is so fresh that most probes will be new to even the most avid readers of McLuhan, and opens a new portal to McLuhan's mind, one that promises to change the ways in which we recognize and interpret McLuhan in the future. Readers will marvel at how the consistency, the clarity of concept, and the abundant wealth of observations, some made twenty or thirty years apart, dovetail to form a whole. Art Director and Designer David Carson presents McLuhan's images with new insight, and has built a work of art that is reminiscent of those lasting works permanently commissioned and interpreted by new generations.
573 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2003
7 people are currently reading
231 people want to read
About the author
Marshall McLuhan
119 books922 followersHerbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as the "father of media studies".
McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" in the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and the term global village. He predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspectives.
McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" in the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and the term global village. He predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspectives.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
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December 29, 2015I came across an old assignment from Graphic Design class with a few pages from this book. From the numerous quotes and art work that I included in the assignment I must have found this a very interesting book. A couple of the quotes: Advertising is the art form of the 20th century. Why is America the land of the overrated child and the underrated adult? How can children grow up in a world in which adults idolize youthfulness?
December 31, 2015
Like Kafka and Freud, McLuhan is a writer who is often referred to or quoted without being understood, resulting in a shorthand for cultural conditions that everyone recognizes but few can articulate. This title provides a refreshing representation of the philosopher's work, artfully arraying his ideas as brief statements in the space of the page and setting them against stunning imagery and design work by David Carson
December 31, 2025
“Youth instinctively understands the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.”
—
“The age of writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.”
—
“The new media are not bridges between man and nature – they are nature.”
—
“We have become the most primitive Paleolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.”
—
“Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has free extended the form of his body to include the universe. For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technologically man it is time that occupies the same role.”
—
“Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.”
—
“Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space, shrouding the race; it is a cosmic invisible architecture of the human dark.”
—
“The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patters of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.”
—
Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.
—
“Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.”
—
“What happens when the ad makers take over all the popular myths and poetry?”
—
“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the society as it is.”
—
“Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and less involvement.”
—
“Languages are environments to which the child relates synesthetically. After childhood, the senses specialize via the channels of dominant technologies and social weaponries.”
—
“The most human thing about us is our technology.”
—
“The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.”
—
“The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive.”
—
“the unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war.”
—
“All of man’s artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent.”
—
“All words, in every language, are metaphors.”
—
“Human perception is literally incarnation.”
—
“The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life.”
—
“All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man’s scope of action, his patterns of association and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.”
—
“The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.”
—
“By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.”
—
“Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped.”
—
“Man in the electronic age has no possible environment accept the globe and no possible occupation except information gathering.”
—
“Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.”
—
“Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion. A natural consequence of a high visual gradient of any culture”
—
“The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.”
—
“The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues.”
—
“We are swiftly moving at present from an era when business was out culture into an era when culture will be our business.”
—
“World War III [will be] a TV guerilla war with no division between civil and military fronts.”
—
“The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums.”
—
“A mass medium is one in which the ‘message’ is not directed at an audience but through an audience. The audience is both show and the message. Language is such a medium, one that includes all who use it as part of the medium itself.”
—
“At the same time as Money and Seurat and Rouault were dimming the visual parameters of art to achieve maximal audience participation, the Symbolists were demonstrating the superiority of suggestion over statement in poetry.”
—
“Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.”
—
“In newspaper, most trivial matters are given considerable additional intensity by being translated into prose at all. That is why no account of anything can be truthful in a newspaper.”
—
“Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another.”
—
“Mass media since the telegraph do not speak to a public but through the public. The TV Image merely makes this fact more obvious.”
—
“Obsolescence means that a service has become so pervasive that it permeates every area of a culture like the vernacular itself. Obsolescence, in short, ensures total acceptance and even wider use.”
—
“Official culture still strives to force the new media to do the work of the old media. But the horseless carriage did not do the work of the horse; it abolished the horse and did what the horse could never do.”
—
“Once a new technology comes into the social milieu it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated.”
—
“Rapid changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.”
—
“Sland is verbal violence on new psychic frontiers.”
—
“Take the date line off a newspaper and it becomes an exotic and fascinating surrealist poem.”
—
“Television will not be understood until it too has become obsolete. At the moment of obsolescence, anything becomes an art form. And then it is possible to do something very good with it.”
—
“The classic curse of Midas, his power of translating all he touched into gold, is in some degree the character of any medium, including language. This myth draws attention to a magic aspect of all extensions of human sense and body; that is to all technology whatever.”
—
“The guy who is going to use a superhighway thinks he is the same man who used the dirt road it replaced…He doesn’t notice that the highway has changed his relation to his family and his fellows.”
—
“The medium is the message. All media (all technologies) amplify human faculties or attributes. All media obsolesce or displace some function or functions by extending the environment of services quantitatively.”
—
“The mind of the artist is always the point of maximal sensitivity and resourcefulness in expressing altered realities in the common culture.”
—
“The right word is not the one that names the thing but the word that gives the effect of that thing.”
—
“While bemoaning the decline of literacy and the obsolescence of the book, the literati have typically ignored the imminence of the decline of speech itself. The individual word, as a store of information and feeling, is already yielding to macroscopic gesticulation.”
—
“The age of writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.”
—
“The new media are not bridges between man and nature – they are nature.”
—
“We have become the most primitive Paleolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.”
—
“Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has free extended the form of his body to include the universe. For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technologically man it is time that occupies the same role.”
—
“Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.”
—
“Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space, shrouding the race; it is a cosmic invisible architecture of the human dark.”
—
“The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patters of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.”
—
Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.
—
“Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.”
—
“What happens when the ad makers take over all the popular myths and poetry?”
—
“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the society as it is.”
—
“Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and less involvement.”
—
“Languages are environments to which the child relates synesthetically. After childhood, the senses specialize via the channels of dominant technologies and social weaponries.”
—
“The most human thing about us is our technology.”
—
“The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.”
—
“The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive.”
—
“the unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war.”
—
“All of man’s artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent.”
—
“All words, in every language, are metaphors.”
—
“Human perception is literally incarnation.”
—
“The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life.”
—
“All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man’s scope of action, his patterns of association and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.”
—
“The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.”
—
“By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.”
—
“Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped.”
—
“Man in the electronic age has no possible environment accept the globe and no possible occupation except information gathering.”
—
“Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.”
—
“Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion. A natural consequence of a high visual gradient of any culture”
—
“The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.”
—
“The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues.”
—
“We are swiftly moving at present from an era when business was out culture into an era when culture will be our business.”
—
“World War III [will be] a TV guerilla war with no division between civil and military fronts.”
—
“The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums.”
—
“A mass medium is one in which the ‘message’ is not directed at an audience but through an audience. The audience is both show and the message. Language is such a medium, one that includes all who use it as part of the medium itself.”
—
“At the same time as Money and Seurat and Rouault were dimming the visual parameters of art to achieve maximal audience participation, the Symbolists were demonstrating the superiority of suggestion over statement in poetry.”
—
“Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.”
—
“In newspaper, most trivial matters are given considerable additional intensity by being translated into prose at all. That is why no account of anything can be truthful in a newspaper.”
—
“Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another.”
—
“Mass media since the telegraph do not speak to a public but through the public. The TV Image merely makes this fact more obvious.”
—
“Obsolescence means that a service has become so pervasive that it permeates every area of a culture like the vernacular itself. Obsolescence, in short, ensures total acceptance and even wider use.”
—
“Official culture still strives to force the new media to do the work of the old media. But the horseless carriage did not do the work of the horse; it abolished the horse and did what the horse could never do.”
—
“Once a new technology comes into the social milieu it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated.”
—
“Rapid changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.”
—
“Sland is verbal violence on new psychic frontiers.”
—
“Take the date line off a newspaper and it becomes an exotic and fascinating surrealist poem.”
—
“Television will not be understood until it too has become obsolete. At the moment of obsolescence, anything becomes an art form. And then it is possible to do something very good with it.”
—
“The classic curse of Midas, his power of translating all he touched into gold, is in some degree the character of any medium, including language. This myth draws attention to a magic aspect of all extensions of human sense and body; that is to all technology whatever.”
—
“The guy who is going to use a superhighway thinks he is the same man who used the dirt road it replaced…He doesn’t notice that the highway has changed his relation to his family and his fellows.”
—
“The medium is the message. All media (all technologies) amplify human faculties or attributes. All media obsolesce or displace some function or functions by extending the environment of services quantitatively.”
—
“The mind of the artist is always the point of maximal sensitivity and resourcefulness in expressing altered realities in the common culture.”
—
“The right word is not the one that names the thing but the word that gives the effect of that thing.”
—
“While bemoaning the decline of literacy and the obsolescence of the book, the literati have typically ignored the imminence of the decline of speech itself. The individual word, as a store of information and feeling, is already yielding to macroscopic gesticulation.”
December 3, 2022
Not "a splendid introduction" to "the full force of Marshall McLuhan's mind and process". The approach to formatting "a collection to McLuhan's finest words" as a collection of probes is interesting and could have had potential as a concept where prescient or timeless thoughts are expressed in short writing and complementary graphics. But as it stands the book probably appeals more to those who are already somewhat familiar with McLuhan's thoughts and who possess the requisite context, and/or some certain type of necessary intellect, to be able to interpret and use the probes meaningfully. Otherwise the probes might be easily refuted or even dismissed as pretentious 1960's bullshit dressed up in 1990's graphic design. For the rest of us McLuhan's aphorisms should probably not be used as-is -- they might well fail to allude, intimate or imply some insight -- but as counterfactual provocations or nostradamic predictions, with pages flipped at random and not read from cover to cover.
March 12, 2016
Another book that I'll keep close to my bedside. It's very nicely designed, full of excellent probes by MM augmented by an excellent introduction and three marvellous chapters. Highly recommended for the McLuhan connoisseur that I gradually seem to become. Thanks for editing the book, David Carson
September 18, 2016
I read this book all wrong - I started at the beginning and read sequentially until I reached the end. Carson's artwork pairs excellently with the hardened little jewels of McLuhan's probes. I'm going to have to buy this so I can read it correctly - randomly flip it open, contemplate a single probe or two in depth, and then leave the book on a windowsill to revisited after days or weeks.
July 9, 2008
Mentally aerating.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews