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Quote by Marshall McLuhan

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The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects

A seminal text that examines how various forms of media shape human perception and communication, analyzing the effects of technology and media on society. more

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Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan was a renowned Canadian philosopher, communication theorist, and media theorist whose theories had a profound impact on modern media and communication technologies. His famous 'The Medium is the Message' theory, among others, has influenced the fields of advertising, film, television, and the internet. more

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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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