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Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

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
Social
Change
Environments
Without
Cultural
Work
Environment
Way
Media
Impossible
Understanding
Knowledge

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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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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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First we build the tools, then they build us.
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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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Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
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First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us
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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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Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
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We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions.
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A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
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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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We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
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I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form.
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People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.
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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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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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Those conspiracies that are too incredible to be believed, are by the same right, those which most often succeed.
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The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
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I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
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