Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
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Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.
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Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress. (p. 54)
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While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.
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Formal cause, as logos, incorporates the patterns of side-effects as part of essential nature: tetrads restore poesis and the making process to the study of artefacts.
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A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
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History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order. (pp. 108-109)
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Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.
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The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums.
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Nobody can doubt that the entire range of applied science contributes to the very format of a newspaper. But the headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since.
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Only puny secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by public incredulity. You can actually dissipate a situation by giving it maximal coverage. As to alarming people, that's done by rumours, not by coverage. (p. 92)
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We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of 'nature.' Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.
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Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.
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The new science of communication is percept, not concept. (p. 259)
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Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
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World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. (p.66)
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Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology. (p. 85)
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Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge. (p. 167)
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I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, 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 unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies. (p. 70)
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We begin again to structure the primordial feelings...from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth. (p. 17)
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Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. (p. 245)
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Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order. (p. 303)
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The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)