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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
Men
Media
Technology
Word
Order
Able
Firsts
Grasp
First
Spoken
Way
Environment

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Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.
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In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.
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Our technology forces us to live mythically
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The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.
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Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.
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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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Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
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Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.
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The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.
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There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.
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Youth instinctively understand the present environment - the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.
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Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up--thatis our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.
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Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
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In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
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The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
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Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.
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Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.
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Affluence creates poverty.
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Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
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If it works, it's obsolete.
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