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Quote by Marshall McLuhan

“Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.”

Quote by Marshall McLuhan

Author

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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“The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.”

Art Whole Feelings Process Modern Communication Art Is Concepts Direct Tendencies Participation Apprehension Modern Communication

Author:Marshall McLuhan

“The mother tongue is propaganda.”

Mother Tongue Propaganda Mother Tongue

Book:Media Research: Technology, Art and Communication

Source: Media Research: Technology, Art and Communication

“The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.”

Use Form Order Language Reader

Book:Marshall McLuhan: Roles, masks and performances

Source: Marshall McLuhan: Roles, masks and performances

“The user of the electric light - or a hammer, or a language, or a book - is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.”

Book Light Language Messages Users Electric Hammers Metamorphosis Interfaces Electric Light

Author:Marshall McLuhan

“Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground - situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.”

Humans Deals Situation Figures Favors Factors Kicks Sensations Pornography Obscenity Fragmentation

Author:Marshall McLuhan

“Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.”

People Today Individual Loss Environment Violence Information Identity Planets Revolution Electric Testing Extinction Prompts Reassurance Rediscovery Loss Of Identity

Author:Marshall McLuhan

“The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.”

Behinds Situation Generations Corporate New Situations

Author:Marshall McLuhan

“Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.”

Men Mass Speed Phenomenon Quantity Electric

Author:Marshall McLuhan

“The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.”

Source: The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

“Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.”

Sleep Assumption Idols Towers Reign Joyce Babel Tower Of Babel Finnegans Wake

Book:The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

Source: The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man