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As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.

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
Mandatory
Program
Becomes
Environment
Information
Art
Work

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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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Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
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Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
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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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First we build the tools, then they build us.
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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.
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Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
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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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Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.
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We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.
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When people become too intense, too serious, they will have trouble in relating to any sort of social game or norm. Perhaps this is why jokes are so important. On one hand they tell us about where the problems and grievances are, and, at the same time, they provide the means of enduring these grievances by laughing at the problems.
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Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.
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Any breakdown is a breakthrough.
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Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.
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The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.
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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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At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.
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The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
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All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
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