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5bd4643
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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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understanding
wisdom
probes
social-science
opinion
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Marshall McLuhan |
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ce54d60
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The medium is the message.
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Marshall McLuhan |
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d9b9619
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One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.
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Marshall McLuhan |
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3f3e12b
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Art is anything you can get away with.
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humor
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Marshall McLuhan |
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bf239b1
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Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate
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Marshall McLuhan |
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9c3dc7f
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the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions
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Marshall McLuhan |
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5d935fe
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All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.
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Marshall McLuhan |
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351f9df
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The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted", he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists between antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power is manifest in the famous story "The Emperor's New Clothes"."
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nonconformist
quentin-fore
insight
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Marshall McLuhan |
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e36a87a
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There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
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Marshall McLuhan |
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fcbe93e
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With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.
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Marshall McLuhan |
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d1e51f1
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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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Marshall McLuhan |
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5072d80
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Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?
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Marshall McLuhan |
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af9e078
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I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what's happening. Because I don't choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something I'm resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understan..
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innovation
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Marshall McLuhan |
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14d76f6
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All media work us over completely.
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tech
social-networking
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Marshall McLuhan |
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83b4cdf
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There is an impression abroad that literary folk are fast readers. Wine tasters are not heavy drinkers. Literary people read slowly because they sample the complex dimensions and flavors of words and phrases. They strive for totality not lineality. They are well aware that the words on the page have to be decanted with the utmost skill. Those who imagine they read only for "content" are illusioned."
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Marshall McLuhan |
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14766cf
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Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. [p. 32]
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Marshall McLuhan |
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8421132
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they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing;
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Marshall McLuhan |
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a992069
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The wheel... is an extension of the foot. The book... is an extension of the eye... Clothing, an extension of the skin... Electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.
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eye
extension
foot
wheel
clothing
electric
nervous-system
skin
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Marshall McLuhan |
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ca0011a
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The greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at the speed of light.
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existentialism
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Marshall McLuhan |
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8cb878e
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To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.
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slap-stick
machine
system
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Marshall McLuhan |
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12c5683
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Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another. Money is metaphor in the sense that it stores skill and labour and also translates one skill into another.
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Marshall McLuhan |
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b8facd2
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Art is whatever you can get away with.
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philosophy
communications
media
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Marshall McLuhan |
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fe8abc2
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Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind.
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Marshall McLuhan |
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afd2a0f
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All through his life, he swung between the ridiculous and the sublime,
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ridiculous
sublime
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Marshall McLuhan |
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6ffd024
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The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.
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Marshall McLuhan |
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24955cc
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Rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience. Subrational beings have no means of achieving such a ratio or proportion in their sense lives but are wired for fixed wave lengths, as it were, having infallibility in their own area of experience. Consciousness, complex and subtle, can be impaired or ended by a mere stepping-up or di..
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rationality
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Marshall McLuhan |
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5cef2f1
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It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert. Sound-light shows, as new cliche, are in effect mergers, retrievers of the tribal condition. It is a state that has already overtaken private enterpris..
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surveillance-society
digital-culture
media-studies
sociology
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Marshall McLuhan |
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0178df2
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As the Western world has invested every aspect of its waking life with visual order, with procedures and spaces that are uniform, continuous and connected, it has progressively alienated itself from needful involvement in its subconscious life.
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Marshall McLuhan |
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32d455c
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In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value."
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Marshall McLuhan |
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d107ca9
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War and the fear of war have always been considered the main incentives to technological extension of our bodies. Indeed, Lewis Mumford, in his The City in History, considers the walled city itself an extension of our skins, as much as housing and clothing. More even than the preparation for war, the aftermath of invasion is a rich technological period; because the subject culture has to adjust all its sense ratios to accommodate the impact..
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Marshall McLuhan |
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6ca68d3
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It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems with Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether. This is only possible for a Christian... All technologies and all cultures, ancient and modern, are part of our immediate expanse. There is hope in this diversity since it creates vast new possibilities of detac..
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marshall-mcluhan
media
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Marshall McLuhan |
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f991f1c
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they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
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Marshall McLuhan |
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4f27b65
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Until writing was invented, man lived in an acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the d..
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Marshall McLuhan |
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841abd2
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The job of art is not to store moments of experience but to explore environments that are otherwise invisible. Art is not a retrieval system of precious moments of past cultures. Art has a live, ongoing function.
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media
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Marshall McLuhan |
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3371943
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The ear favours no particular "point of view." We are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web around us. We say, "Music shall fill the air." We never say, "Music shall fill a particular segment of the air."We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus. Sounds come from "above," from "below," from in "front" of us, from "behind" us, from our "right," from our "left." We can't shut out sound automatically. We simply are n..
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music
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Marshall McLuhan |
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cea8d19
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The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
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vigilance
marshall-mcluhan
attention
indifference
media
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Marshall McLuhan |
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1636408
|
The stars are so big,
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Marshall McLuhan |
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10d3db3
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You and I are faced with one of those situations (which fortunately are not very numerous in one lifetime) which cannot possibly be adequately judged beforehand. It strikes me as a colossal gamble, or rather, a very great adventure. And personally I am considerably exhilarated by the risks! ... The greatness of the adventure perhaps consists partly in the fact that as a Catholic I can marry only once! But, as with being born, perhaps once i..
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marriage
marshall-mcluhan
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Marshall McLuhan |
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79412a0
|
At every turn, while he was investigating the background for his study of Thomas Nashe, he would encounter the Church -- what Chesterton called (another book title) The Thing. It was everywhere. At one point, he later told me (and he was never very specific just when that point occurred), he decided that the thing had to be sorted out or he couldn't rest. Either it ws true, or it wasn't. Either the entire matter was true, all of it, exactly..
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marshall-mcluhan
conversion
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Marshall McLuhan |
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b9ddebb
|
The "child" was an invention of the seventeenth century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare's day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense. Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up - that is our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice."
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growing-up
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Marshall McLuhan |
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d9a6322
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Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up.
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Marshall McLuhan |
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86056ee
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Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery--to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.
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Marshall McLuhan |
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538e4cc
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Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment--of what's really going on--affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.
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Marshall McLuhan |
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a18cde6
|
Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.
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reading
writing
sound
language
speech
|
Marshall McLuhan |