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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.

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
Communication
Media
Talking
Nature
Always
Shaped
Men
Societies
Content
Communicate

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Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.
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Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.
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A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
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Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.
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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.
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Explore the situation. Statements are expendable. Don't keep on looking in the rearview mirror and defending the status quo which is outmoded the moment it happened.
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Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.
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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.
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The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
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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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Like primitive, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. It doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs.
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Work does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
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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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Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
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The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
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Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.
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There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word.
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The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.
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