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The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

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
Attention
Perceptible
Whole
Invisible
Always
Environmental
Field
Fields
Environment
Present
Simply

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The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
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I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.
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Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.
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Today, the mass audience (the successor to the public) can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions.
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The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media--movies, Telstar, flight--far surpassesany possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.
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Affluence creates poverty.
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Art is anything you can get away with.
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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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Jokes are grievances.
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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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I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties.
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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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Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.
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The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
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The rythms of typing favour short, concise sentences, sentences with oral form.
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By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
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The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.
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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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I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
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