"Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity."
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Quote collection
Marshall McLuhan quotes (page 7 of 19)
376 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role."
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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."
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"Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force."
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"Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind."
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"A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters."
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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 unification and involvement."
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"The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns."
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"It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame."
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"Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener."
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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 remains of the old world at will."
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"In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, bur an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground."
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"There ain't no grammatical errors in a non-literate society."
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"Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment."
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"Invention is the mother of necessities."
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"An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him."
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"I do not explain, I explore."
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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."
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"The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy."
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"It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time."
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