Quote

Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up--thatis our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.

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
Today
Childhood
Suffice
Children
Grow
Incline
Work
Growing
Instruction
World
Grows
Worlds
Education
Absurd
Child
Total
Lives
Neither
Two
Mere
Inclines

More quotes by Marshall McLuhan

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To say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.
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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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Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
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People hope that if they scream loudly enough about values then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.
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Affluence creates poverty.
Marshall McLuhan
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Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.
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The user of the electric light - or a hammer, or a language, or a book - is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.
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The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...
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The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
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The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity.... Participation was high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability.
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While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.
Marshall McLuhan
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Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
Marshall McLuhan
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Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
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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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Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
Marshall McLuhan
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In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.
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It has always been the artist who realizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it
Marshall McLuhan
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Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.
Marshall McLuhan
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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 present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.
Marshall McLuhan