Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.
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Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence. (p. 186)
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The coverage is the war. If there were no coverage, there'd be no war. Yes, the newsmen and the mediamen around the world are actually the fighters, not the soldiers anymore.
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Philosophy was as naive as science in its unconscious acceptance of the assumptions or dynamic of typography. (p. 278)
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When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments. (p. 180)
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Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. (p. 109)
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The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures. (p. 99)
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Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
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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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It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV. (p. 53)
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The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego. (p. 58)
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People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath. (p. 184)
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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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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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The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.
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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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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 become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
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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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For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
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The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
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The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement. (p. 81)
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I am not a 'culture critic' because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.
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Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.