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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.
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
Tasks
Literate
Ground
Minus
Figure
Predecessors
Figures
Confronting
Lived
Activities
Activity
Hidden
Live
Contemporary
Men
Task
Familiarly
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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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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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Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
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Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.
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Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.
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Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
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Information and images bump against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this interfacing is like the babble of a village or tavern gossip session.
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Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.
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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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In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.
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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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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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The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.
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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
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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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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 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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