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

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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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...the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph.
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In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.
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The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...
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The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.
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The user of the electric light - or a hammer, or a language, or a book - is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.
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Any breakdown is a breakthrough.
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Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.
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Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones
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By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
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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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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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The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration.
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Some of my fellow academics are very hostile, but I sympathize with them. They've been asleep for 500 years and they don't like anybody who comes along and stirs them up.
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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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The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form.
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If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.
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The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.
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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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The most human thing about us is our technology.
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