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Portrait of Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan

(1911–1980) Opinion Journalist Canada

433 quotes in 1404 categories

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Marshall McLuhan was an opinion journalist from Canada, best known for Understanding Media.

Quick Facts About Marshall McLuhan

Born: July 21, 1911
Died: December 31, 1980
Nationality: Canada
Profession: Opinion Journalist
Notable works: Understanding Media
Spouse: Corinne Lewis

About Marshall McLuhan

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. Raised in Winnipeg, McLuhan studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as "the father of media studies".

Biography source: Wikipedia

Awards & Honors

Molson Prize Person of National Historic Significance Governor General's Award for English-language non-fiction Companion of the Order of Canada

Quotes by Marshall McLuhan · Page 11

Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual…

Marshall McLuhan

Challenges

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Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch.

Marshall McLuhan

Action

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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

Marshall McLuhan

Dangerous

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Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.

Marshall McLuhan

Bias

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Since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience.

Marshall McLuhan

Central nervous system

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Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.

Marshall McLuhan

Force

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The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.

Marshall McLuhan

Conditions

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The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed…

Marshall McLuhan

Anarchy

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Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western…

Marshall McLuhan

Action

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Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to…

Marshall McLuhan

Body

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In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology...…

Marshall McLuhan

Art

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Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower…

Marshall McLuhan

Babel

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Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new…

Marshall McLuhan

Creating

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If people were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social…

Marshall McLuhan

Able

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The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a…

Marshall McLuhan

Aspect

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The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages…

Marshall McLuhan

Alphabet

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The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world; they are the real world and they reshape what…

Marshall McLuhan

Media

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It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.

Marshall McLuhan

Brutal

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Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the…

Marshall McLuhan

Communicate

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The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

Marshall McLuhan

Photograph

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The only way to recover the old world is to induce the media into vomiting it back up.

Marshall McLuhan

Journalism

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Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.

Marshall McLuhan

Attention

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Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men.

Marshall McLuhan

Business

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Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption,…

Marshall McLuhan

Assumption

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Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic…

Marshall McLuhan

Arise

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“The Newtonian God—the God who made a clock-like universe, wound it, and withdrew—died a long time ago. This is what Nietzsche meant…

Marshall McLuhan

God

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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…

Marshall McLuhan

Cohesion

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“The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those…

Marshall McLuhan

Digital world

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The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically…

Marshall McLuhan

Behinds

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If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors…

Marshall McLuhan

Ancestor

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The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will…

Marshall McLuhan

Cities

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Today's child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but…

Marshall McLuhan

19th century

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The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They…

Marshall McLuhan

Domain

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Marshall McLuhan by topic

Technology (45) Media (45) Art (44) Inspirational (35) Men (32) World (31) Time (29) Artist (29) Environment (28) People (23) Form (22) Nature (21) Language (19) Information (19) Humans (19) Space (18) Love (18) Electric (17) Way (16) Patterns (16) Social (15) Mediums (15) Education (15) Age (15) Advertising (15)