Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.
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Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story. (p. 223)
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As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'
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Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark. (p. 14)
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PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. 'LSD doesn’t mean anything until you consume it,' she said. 'Likewise McLuhan.' Do you see any similarities?
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People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.
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The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear. (p. 18)
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One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast.
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The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.
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America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy - the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.
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The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. (p. 66)
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Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia. (p. 130)
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There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious. (p. 260)
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Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)
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The percept takes priority of the concept.
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Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
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The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. (p. 30)
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Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.
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An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.
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The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.
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The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature. (p. 14)
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War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education. (p. 381)
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American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
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Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of 'what the public wants' played over its own nerves. (p. 68)