Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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)
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Today, computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. (p. 80)
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Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.
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Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things. (p. 90)
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Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.
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Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia. (p. 130)
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The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.
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In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not netural or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.
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The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.
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Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another. (p. 298)
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Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.
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The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.
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The 'interface' of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis. (p. 161)
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African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. (p. 44)
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Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
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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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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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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. (p. 201)
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When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.
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The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.
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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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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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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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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.