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The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.

Marshall McLuhan

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Marshall McLuhan
Age: 69 †
Born: 1911
Born: July 21
Died: 1980
Died: December 31
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Edmonton
Alberta
Herbert Marshall McLuhan
Marshall MacLuhan
Marshall Mac Luhan
Way
Environment
Men
Media
Technology
Word
Order
Able
Firsts
Grasp
First
Spoken

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Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the content of the other, obscuring the operation of both.
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Transmitted at the speed of light, all events on this planet are simultaneous. In the electric environment of information all events are simultaneous, there is no time or space separating events.
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We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions.
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You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources.
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My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.
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Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
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We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.
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Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
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Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.
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When people become too intense, too serious, they will have trouble in relating to any sort of social game or norm. Perhaps this is why jokes are so important. On one hand they tell us about where the problems and grievances are, and, at the same time, they provide the means of enduring these grievances by laughing at the problems.
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A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.
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Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.
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For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.
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Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.
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The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis.
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Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
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the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions
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The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
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The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.
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Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
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