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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.

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
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Greater
Experiments
Psych
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When people become too intense, too serious, they will have trouble in relating to any sort of social game or norm. Perhaps this is why jokes are so important. On one hand they tell us about where the problems and grievances are, and, at the same time, they provide the means of enduring these grievances by laughing at the problems.
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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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Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
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Our technology forces us to live mythically
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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
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Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.
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Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the content of the other, obscuring the operation of both.
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Electronic man has no physical body.
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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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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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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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The mother tongue is propaganda.
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People hope that if they scream loudly enough about values then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.
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Fish did not discover water.
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Anything that's popular is a rear-view image.
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The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos - resonant utterance or word.
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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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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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The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.
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The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
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