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Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Marshall McLuhan Quotes

“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.”

WayHumansPoliticalSocialUnderstandingMoralEnvironmentImpossibleEconomicMediaMessagesConsequencePsychologicalMediumsFacultyEthicalAestheticExtensionsPsychicsMassageCultural Change
Book:The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects
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“Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. 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.”

MenWorldWayUseBodyFormDesireTurnsWishSexWealthTechnologyNormalMachinesPlantEvolveOrgansBeesProvidingNew WaysEnablingReciprocateModifyingUse Of Technology
Author:Marshall McLuhan
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“You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says that the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?”

MenActionSocialRolesEnvironmentGreaterMediaTvsTypeDadSingingFolksInventionMediumsVillageProfessorsDefiningInvolvementLinearSeparatingThoughts And Actions
Book:The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects
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“New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had though and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature.”

WayWritingFirstsMayMadeOrderLiteratureMistakeKnownMediaAchievementMerePatternsMade ItCodeGreekVisualsPrintingTransmissionSupposingNew MediaSupposing That
Author:Marshall McLuhan
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“Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves.”

HumansTakenMediaTvsSpeechFlowMetaphorRadioRangeGesturesFlexibilityWireVacuumsTubesCircuitsMechanization
Author:Marshall McLuhan
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“Erwin Schrodinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in quantum physics in the language of Newtonian physics. That is, they agreed to discuss and report the non-visual, electronic world in the language of the visual world of Newton.”

WorldLanguageMediaDiscoveryFellowsPhysicsExperimentsVisualsReportsQuantumPhysicistNewtonQuantum PhysicsNew DiscoveriesSchrodinger
Author:Marshall McLuhan
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