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Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the Tower of Babel by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr

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
Men
Means
Computer
Sought
Today
Promise
Computers
May
Whose
Division
Babel
Wells
Highest
Scale
Tower
Human
Hold
Scales
Extension
Humans
Technology
Separation
Extensions
Well
Heaven
Powers
Heavens
Mean
Language
Instant
Towers

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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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To say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.
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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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Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
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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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The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media--movies, Telstar, flight--far surpassesany possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.
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It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.
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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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Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
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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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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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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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Only the vanquished remember history.
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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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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
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The story begins only when the book closes.
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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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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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the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions
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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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