Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures. (p. 25)
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Aretino, like Rabelais and Cervantes, proclaimed the meaning of Typography as Gargantuan, Fantastic, Supra-human. (p. 220)
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It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
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All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.
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King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs. (p. 16)
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Try not to have Emily exposed to hours and hours of TV. It is a vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young.
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A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (p. 73)
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With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance. (p. 191)
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All words, in every language, are metaphors.
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All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.
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Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class. (p. 136)
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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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When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.
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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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Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.
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At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.
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The medium is the message.
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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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The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture. (p. 168)
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Human perception is literally incarnation.
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Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground - situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.
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Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.
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Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose 'touch' without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.
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When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.