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Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Marshall McLuhan Quotes

“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 detachment and amusement at human gullibility and self-deception. There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the "Prince of this World" is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is his master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored.”

MediaCatholicismMarshall Mcluhan
Book:The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion
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“In the "Republic," Plato vigorously attacked the oral, poetized form as a vehicle for communicating knowledge. He pleaded for a more precise method of communication and classification ("The Ideas"), one which would favor the investigation of facts, principles of reality, human nature, and conduct. What the Greeks meant by "poetry" was radically different from what we mean by poetry. Their "poetic" expression was a product of a collective psyche and mind. The mimetic form, a technique that exploited rhythm, meter and music, achieved the desired psychological response in the listener. Listeners could memorize with greater ease what was sung than what was said. Plato attacked this method because it discouraged disputation and argument. It was in his opinion the chief obstacle to abstract, speculative reasoning - he called it "a poison, and an enemy of the people.”

PoetryMediaPlatoHomerThe RepublicMedia Criticism
Book:The Medium is the Massage
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“The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.”

WayLittlesCultureCommunityMediaFieldsReturnUnderstoodPatternsNormUnifiedTribalismCohesionElectronic Media
Book:Media Research: Technology, Art and Communication
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“The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media--movies, Telstar, flight--far surpassesany possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.”

WorldTwoCharacterInfluenceMediaInformationMomBearsDadCirclesFlightExpertsElectricSageEarnestMom And Dad
Book:The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects
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“Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.”

IndividualEnvironmentAwarenessMediaDevelopmentEnvironmentalPatternsCriticalProfessionalismGround Rules
Book:The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects
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“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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“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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