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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.

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
Collective
Carried
Amplify
Complete
Constitute
Huge
Disregard
Media
Extend
Technology
Technologies
Social
Collectives
Body
Surgery

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The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the search and form of human associations and action.
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Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
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Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
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Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.
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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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I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt.
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Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.
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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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As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.
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The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.
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Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men.
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One main condition of aristocratic life was present in the South and not in the North--personal responsibility to other human beings for education and material welfare. (A Carnegie or a Ford, like a bureaucracy, molds the lives of millions without taking any responsibility.)
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A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.
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On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers everybody is a member of the crew. We have moved into an age in which everybody's activities affect everybody else.
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A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.
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Nobody can commit photography alone.
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Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
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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 only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions
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We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.
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