»The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.«
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man.
»Perhaps the most obvious closure or psychic consequence of any new technology is just the demand for it. Nobody wants a motorcar till there are motorcars, and nobody is interested in TV until there are TV programs. This power of technology to create its own world of demand is not independent of technology being first an extension of our own bodies and senses.«
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man.
»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 discarnate 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.«
— Marshall McLuhan, New York Magazine, March 17, 1978
