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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
Figure
Predecessors
Figures
Confronting
Lived
Activities
Activity
Hidden
Live
Contemporary
Men
Task
Familiarly
Tasks
Literate
Ground
Minus

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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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There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.
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The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.
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The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configurations and structure.
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Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
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One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.
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The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity.... Participation was high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability.
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Nobody can commit photography alone.
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The mother tongue is propaganda.
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My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.
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The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.
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The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts.
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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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Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.
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If it works, it's obsolete.
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It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.
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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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Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws.
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Life. Consider the alternative.
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The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.
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