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Marshall McLuhan -
Understanding Media (1964)
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Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves.
Marshall McLuhan
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Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.
Marshall McLuhan
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The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.
Marshall McLuhan
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Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice.
Marshall McLuhan
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A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.
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.
Marshall McLuhan
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A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor?
Marshall McLuhan
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Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.
Marshall McLuhan
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All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.
Marshall McLuhan
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Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.
Marshall McLuhan
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In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.
Marshall McLuhan
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Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.
Marshall McLuhan
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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.
Marshall McLuhan
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Any ad consciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconsious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists.
Marshall McLuhan
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The mosaic form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in depth, of the whole being, as does the sense of touch.
Marshall McLuhan
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We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation.
Marshall McLuhan
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Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.
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.
Marshall McLuhan
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It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.
Marshall McLuhan
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There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV.... Hot media are... low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.
Marshall McLuhan
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In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.
Marshall McLuhan
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The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
Marshall McLuhan
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Quote of the day
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
Marshall McLuhan
Creative Commons
Born:
July 21, 1911
Died:
December 31, 1980
(aged 69)
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