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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
Talking
Nature
Always
Shaped
Men
Societies
Content
Communicate
Communication
Media

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The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.
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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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Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.
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Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men.
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If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire.
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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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The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.
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Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
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People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.
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Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
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A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
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Any breakdown is a breakthrough.
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All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
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I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form.
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First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us
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When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.
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The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
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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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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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