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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
Always
Environmental
Field
Fields
Environment
Present
Simply
Attention
Perceptible
Whole
Invisible

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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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There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word.
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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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Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.
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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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The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.
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The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.
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When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.
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Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.
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It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.
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The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.
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Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
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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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Work does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
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If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
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Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.
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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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If it works, it's obsolete.
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Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
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I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
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