Quote

The user of the electric light - or a hammer, or a language, or a book - is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.

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
Language
Hammers
Light
Users
Book
Electric
Total
Interface
Content
Interfaces
Message
Metamorphosis
Messages
User
Consider
Hammer

More quotes by Marshall McLuhan

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Explore the situation. Statements are expendable. Don't keep on looking in the rearview mirror and defending the status quo which is outmoded the moment it happened.
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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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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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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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The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration.
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The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
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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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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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Like primitive, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. It doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs.
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Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.
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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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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 huge advantage of Canada is its backwardness.
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Fish did not discover water.
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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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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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Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.
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A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.
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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 global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
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