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An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.

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
Things
Inspire
Administrator
Men
Touch
Bureaucratic
World
Bigs
Merging
Persons
Administrators
Person
Inspires
Feel
Abstraction
Feels
Entity
Real
Terror

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In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology... But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit.
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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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I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties.
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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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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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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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Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product.
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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
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The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.
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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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Our technology forces us to live mythically
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Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.
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In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
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Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.
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Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.
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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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One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.
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If it works, it's obsolete.
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We impose the form of the old on the content of the new.
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The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.
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