Daily Inspiration Quote by Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan’s line turns a market-research cliche into a sly indictment of how “consumer demand” gets manufactured. The first “curves” are the respectable kind: data visualizations, ratings charts, trend lines - the cool geometry of listening to the public. Producers, in this mode, pose as humble translators of desire, merely reading the audience’s mind through statistics. Then McLuhan flips the same word into something sensual and coercive. When producers want to instruct rather than respond, they speak “in curves”: bodies, product design, glossy cinematography, soft-focus persuasion. The medium stops measuring appetite and starts shaping it.

The intent is to expose a bait-and-switch at the heart of mass culture: feedback becomes a pretext for control. Subtextually, he’s mocking the idea that culture industries are democratic because they track preferences. The graph implies objectivity and consent; the curve implies seduction and asymmetrical power. One “curve” flatters us as rational agents; the other treats us as creatures steered by attraction, rhythm, and repetition.

Context matters: McLuhan wrote in the long shadow of postwar advertising, television’s rise, and the growing authority of social science to legitimize corporate decisions. His broader claim - “the medium is the message” - hums underneath. The point isn’t that producers lie about what people want; it’s that the tools of communication rearrange wanting itself. Even the joke carries a warning: once desire is a design problem, the public’s role shrinks from citizen to target, from participant to pattern.