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Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Marshall McLuhan Quotes

“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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“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 understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons.”

PeopleIfsThinkingKnowsWaySeemsTurnsCasesHappeningsOppositesInnovationDeterminedFavorsBest WayButtonsTurn OffI Am DeterminedJuggernaut
Author: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.”

PeopleWayPersonsWarSelfLightAbleSocialTechnologyFireTasksIndependentPatternsEducationalPursueEmploymentArtisticWarmthCandleElectricAutonomyLatentIndependent ThoughtAutomationElectric Light
Author:Marshall McLuhan
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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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“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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“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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