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

More quotes by Marshall McLuhan

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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 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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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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A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.
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The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration.
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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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Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.
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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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The age of automation is going to be the age of do it yourself.
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The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.
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There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.
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Nobody can commit photography alone.
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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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If it works, it's obsolete.
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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 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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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
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If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire.
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All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors.
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Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.
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