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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.

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
Action
Association
Form
Medium
Human
Mediums
Humans
Search
Message
Messages
Shapes
Associations
Communication
Controls

More quotes by Marshall McLuhan

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If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.
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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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Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.
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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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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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The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.
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The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form.
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Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
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Jokes are grievances.
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...the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph.
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Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion.
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There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.
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Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?
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The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis.
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Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands.
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The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
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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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Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.
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Fish did not discover water.
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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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