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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.

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
Creative
Entertainment
Politics
Merely
Audience
Questions
Successor
Force
Offers
Successors
Given
Mass
Participating
Used
Instead
Packages
Today
Answers
Passive
Public
Yesterday

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The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.
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The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.
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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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What goes on inside the school is an interruption of education.
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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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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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Youth instinctively understand the present environment - the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.
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Most people are alive in an earlier time, but you must be alive in our own time.
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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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Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
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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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Some of my fellow academics are very hostile, but I sympathize with them. They've been asleep for 500 years and they don't like anybody who comes along and stirs them up.
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The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.
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Life. Consider the alternative.
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In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.
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The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
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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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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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The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
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Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation.
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