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In The Phaedrus, Plato Argued That The New Arrival Of Writing Would Revolutionize Culture For The Worst. He Suggested That It Would Substitute Reminiscence For Thought And Mechanical Learning For The True Dialect Of The Living Quest For Truth By Discourse And Conversation.

-Marshall McLuhan

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In The Phaedrus, Plato

Marshall McLuhan

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In The Phaedrus, Plato Argued That The New Arrival Of Writing Would Revolutionize Culture For The Worst. He Suggested That It Would Substitute Reminiscence For Thought And Mechanical Learning For The True Dialect Of The Living Quest For Truth By Discourse And Conversation.

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As The Unity Of The Modern World Becomes Increasingly A Technological Rather Than A Social Affair, The Techniques Of The Arts Provide The Most Valuable Means Of Insight Into The Real Direction Of Our Own Collective Purposes.

At Electric Speed, All Forms Are Pushed To The Limits Of Their Potential.

To Say That A Body Or Its Gravitational Field 'bends In Space' In Its Vicinity Is The Discuss Visual Space In Acoustic Terms.

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Professionalism Merges The Individual Into Patterns Of Total Environment. Amateurism Seeks The Development Of The Total Awareness Of The Individual And The Critical Awareness Of The Groundrules Of Society. The Amateur Can Afford To Lose. The Professional Tends To Classify And Specialise, To Accept Uncritically The Groundrules Of The Environment. The Groundrules Provided By The Mass Response Of His Colleagues Serve As A Pervasive Environment Of Which He Is Contentedly Unaware. The 'expert' Is The Man Who Stays Put.

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It Is The Framework Which Changes With Each New Technology And Not Just The Picture Within The Frame.

Typography Tended To Alter Language From A Means Of Perception And Exploration To A Portable Commodity.

The Visual Power Of The Phonetic Alphabet Is The Translate Other Languages Into Itself Is Part Of Its Power To Invade Right Hemisphere (oral) Cultures.

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The Media Have Substituted Themselves For The Older World.

The Percept Takes Priority Of The Concept.

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Violence, Whether Spiritual Or Physical, Is A Quest For Identity And The Meaningful. The Less Identity, The More Violence.

Ads Represent The Main Channel Of Intellectual And Artistic Effort In The Modern World.

Youth Instinctively Understand The Present Environment - The Electric Drama. It Lives Mythically And In Depth.

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Computers Can Do Better Than Ever What Needn't Be Done At All. Making Sense Is Still A Human Monopoly.

Radical Changes Of Identity, Happening Suddenly And In Very Brief Intervals Of Time, Have Proved More Deadly And Destructive Of Human Values Than Wars Fought With Hardware Weapons.

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All Media Are Extensions Of Some Human Faculty- Psychic Or Physical.

The Photograph Reverses The Purpose Of Travel, Which Until Now Had Been To Encounter The Strange And Unfamiliar.

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We Are All Robots When Uncritically Involved With Our Technologies.

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I Am Not A "culture Critic" Because I Am Not In Any Way Interested In Classifying Cultural Forms. I Am A Metaphysician, Interested In The Life Of The Forms And Their Surprising Modalities. That Is Why I Have No Interest In The Academic World.

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The Only People Who Have Proof Of Their Sanity Are Those Who Have Been Discharged From Mental Institutions

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.

If We Understand The Revolutionary Transformations Caused By New Media, We Can Anticipate And Control Them; But If We Continue In Our Self-induced Subliminal Trance, We Will Be Their Slaves.

Mass Man Is A Phenomenon Of Electric Speed, Not Of Physical Quantity.

I Am Curious To Know What Would Happen If Art Were Suddenly Seen For What It Is, Namely, Exact Information Of How To Rearrange One's Psyche In Order To Anticipate The Next Blow From Our Own Extended Faculties.

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In The Land Of The Blind, The One-eyed Man Is A Hallucinating Idiot...for He Sees What No One Else Does: Things That, To Everyone Else, Are Not There.

The Scientist Rigorously Defends His Right To Be Ignorant Of Almost Everything Except His Specialty.

Anyone Who Tries To Make A Distinction Between Education And Entertainment Doesn't Know The First Thing About Either.

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The Alphabet Was One Thing When Applied To Clay Or Stone, And Quite Another When Set Down On Light Papyrus.

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Rearview Mirror

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The Rythms Of Typing Favour Short, Concise Sentences, Sentences With Oral Form.

Photography Turns People Into Things And Their Image Into A Mass Consumer Product.

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What Goes On Inside The School Is An Interruption Of Education.

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Typography Is Not Only A Technology But Is In Itself A Natural Resource Or Staple, Like Cotton Or Timber Or Radio; And, Like Any Staple, It Shapes Not Only Private Sense Ratios But Also Patterns Of Communal Interdependence.

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People Who Write Obscurely Are Either Unskilled In Writing Or Up To Mischief.

Electronic Man Has No Physical Body.

A Commercial Society Whose Members Are Essentially Ascetic And Indifferent In Social Ritual Has To Be Provided With Blueprints And Specifications For Evoking The Right Tone For Every Occasion.

Canadians Are The People Who Learned To Live Without The Bold Accents Of The Natural Ego-trippers Of Other Lands.

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The New Media Are Not Bridges Between Man And Nature - They Are Nature...

If A Work Of Art Is To Explore New Environments, It Is Not To Be Regarded As A Blueprint But Rather As A Form Of Action-painting.

If It Works, It's Obsolete.

Once We Have Surrendered Our Senses And Nervous Systems To The Private Manipulation Of Those Who Would Try To Benefit From Taking A Lease On Our Eyes And Ears And Nerves, We Don't Really Have Any Rights Left. Leasing Our Eyes And Ears And Nerves To Commercial Interests Is Like Handing Over The Common Speech To A Private Corporation, Or Like Giving The Earth's Atmosphere To A Company As A Monopoly.

Jokes Are Grievances.

Advertising Is The Greatest Art Form Of The 20th Century.

Anything That's Popular Is A Rear-view Image.

The Products Of Modern Science Are Not In Themselves Good Or Bad; It Is The Way They Are Used That Determines Their Value.

Except For Light, All Other Media Come In Pairs, With One Acting As The "content" Of The Other, Obscuring The Operation Of Both.

There Ain't No Grammatical Errors In A Non-literate Society.

America Is The Only Country Ever Founded On The Printed Word.

People Don't Actually Read Newspapers - They Get Into Them Every Morning Like A Hot Bath.

Obsolescence Never Meant The End Of Anything, It's Just The Beginning.

The Artist Is A Person Who Is Expert In The Training Of Perception.

The Public Has Yet To See Tv As Tv. Broadcasters Have No Awareness Of Its Potential. The Movie People Are Just Beginning To Get A Grasp On Film.

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All Forms Of Violence Are Quests For Identity. When You Live On The Frontier, You Have No Identity. You're A Nobody.

Everybody Tends To Merge His Identity With Other People At The Speed Of Light. It's Called Being Mass Man.

The Movie Stars And Matinee Idols Are Put Into The Public Domain By Photography. They Become Dreams That Money Can Buy. They Can Be Bought And Thumbed More Easily Than Public Prostitutes.

Diaper Backward Spells Repaid. Think About It.

Our Technology Forces Us To Live Mythically, But We Continue To Think Fragmentarily, And On Single, Separate Planes.

Politics Will Eventually Be Replaced By Imagery. The Politician Will Be Only Too Happy To Abdicate In Favor Of His Image, Because The Image Will Be So Much More Powerful Than He Could Ever Be.

There Is No More Great Men; There Is Only Great Committees.

Even Mud Gives The Illusion Of Depth.

I Don't Necessarily Agree With Everything I Say.

All Discoveries In Art And Science Result From An Accumulation Of Errors.

The Village Had Institutionalized All Human Functions In Forms Of Low Intensity.... Participation Was High And Organization Was Low. This Is The Formula For Stability.

The Genteel Is A Mighty Catafalque Of Service-with-a-smile And Flattering Solicitude Smothering Every Spontaneous Movement Of Thought Or Feeling.

The Laws Of The Media, In Tetrad Form, Bring Logos And Formal Cause Up To Date To Reveal Analytically The Structure Of All Human Artefacts.

We Have Be-come Irrevocably Involved With, And Responsible For, Each Other.

The Only Way To Recover The Old World Is To Induce The Media Into Vomiting It Back Up.

The Age Of Automation Is Going To Be The Age Of "do It Yourself".

Characteristics

Interface, Of The Resonant Interval As 'where The Action Is', Whether Chemical, Psychic Or Social, Involves Touch.

Environments Are Not Just Containers, But Are Processes That Change The Content Totally.

Huck Finn. Loss Of Identity Drives People To Nostalgia. Electronic Man Has No Physical Body, So He [jimmy Carter] Puts Nostalgia In Its Place.

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?

The Potential Of Any Technology Is Always Dissipated By Its Users Involvement In Its Predecessors...computer Are Still Serving Mainly To Sustain Precomputer Effects.

It's Misleading To Suppose There's Any Basic Difference Between Education & Entertainment. This Distinction Merely Relieves People Of The Responsibility Of Looking Into The Matter.

There Is Absolutely No Inevitability, So Long As There Is A Willingness To Contemplate What Is Happening.

A Nomadic Society Cannot Experience Enclosed Space.

People Hope That If They Scream Loudly Enough About "values" Then Others Will Mistake Them For Serious, Sensitive Souls Who Have Higher And Nobler Perceptions Than Ordinary People. Otherwise, Why Would They Be Screaming? Moral Bitterness Is A Basic Technique For Endowing The Idiot With Dignity.

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.

Only The Vanquished Remember History.

The Greatest Propaganda In The World Is Our Mother Tongue, That Is What We Learn As Children, And Which We Learn Unconsciously. That Shapes Our Perceptions For Life. That Is Propaganda At Its Most Extreme Form.

The 'expert' Is The Man Who Stays Put.

Human Perception Is Literally Incarnation.

In The Phaedrus, Plato Argued That The New Arrival Of Writing Would Revolutionize Culture For The Worst. He Suggested That It Would Substitute Reminiscence For Thought And Mechanical Learning For The True Dialect Of The Living Quest For Truth By Discourse And Conversation.

When Producers Want To Know What The Public Wants, They Graph It As Curves. When They Want To Tell The Public What To Get, They Say It In Curves.

Artists In Various Fields Are Always The First To Discover How To Enable One Medium Or To Release The Power Of Another.

Man Works When He Is Partially Involved. When He Is Totally Involved He Is At Play Or Leisure.

Any Understanding Of Social And Cultural Change Is Impossible Without A Knowledge Of The Way Media Work As Environments.

Transmitted At The Speed Of Light, All Events On This Planet Are Simultaneous. In The Electric Environment Of Information All Events Are Simultaneous, There Is No Time Or Space Separating Events.

It Is Perhaps Typical Of Very Creative Minds That They Hit Very Large Nails Not Quite On The Head.

The 'content' Of Any Medium Is Always Another Medium.

The Artist Must Ever Play And Experiment With New Means Of Arranging Experience, Even Though The Majority Of His Audience May Prefer To Remain Fixed In Their Old Perceptual Attitudes.

Language Does For Intelligence What The Wheel Does For The Feet And The Body. It Enables Them To Move From Thing To Thing With Greater Ease And Speed And Ever Less Involvement.

The Business Of The Advertiser Is To See That We Go About Our Business With Some Magic Spell Or Tune Or Slogan Throbbing Quietly In The Background Of Our Minds.

The Modern Little Red Riding Hood, Reared On Singing Commercials, Has No Objection To Being Eaten By The Wolf.

Advertising Business

Only The Small Secrets Need To Be Protected. The Large Ones Are Kept Secret By Public Incredulity.

The Movie, By Sheer Speeding Up Of The Mechanical, Carried Us From The World Of Sequence And Connections Into The World Of Creative Configurations And Structure.

The Medium Is The Message.

Advertising Is An Environmental Striptease For A World Of Abundance.

Nowadays There Is No Conversation At All. Teachers Distrust Talk As Much As Business Men.

As Technology Advances, It Reverses The Characteristics Of Every Situation Again And Again. The Age Of Automation Is Going To Be The Age Of 'do It Yourself.'

Language Always Preserves A Play Or Figure/ground Relation Between Experience, And Perception And Its Replay In Expression.

Any Ad Consciously Attended To Is Comical. Ads Are Not Meant For Conscious Consumption. They Are Intended As Subliminal Pills For The Subconsious In Order To Exercise An Hypnotic Spell, Especially On Sociologists.

The Specialist Is One Who Never Makes Small Mistakes While Moving Toward The Grand Fallacy.

Gutenberg Made Everybody A Reader. Xerox Makes Everybody A Publisher.

Today The Tyrant Rules Not By Club Or Fist, But Disguised As A Market Researcher, He Shepherds His Flocks In The Ways Of Utility And Comfort.

The Literate Man Is A Sucker For Propaganda...you Cannot Propagandize A Native. You Can Sell Him Rum And Trinkets, But You Cannot Sell Him Ideas.

If The Nineteenth Century Was The Age Of The Editorial Chair, Ours Is The Century Of The Psychiatrist's Couch.

New Media Are New Archetypes, At First Disguised As Degradations Of Older Media.

Great Art Speaks A Language Which Every Intelligent Person Can Understand. The People Who Call Themselves Modernists Today Speak A Different Language.

Food For The Mind Is Like Food For The Body: The Inputs Are Never The Same As The Outputs.

Art Is Anything You Can Get Away With.

Don't Ask Whether It Is Right Or Wrong. Instead Try To Find Out What Is Going On.

The Young Today Cannot Follow Narrative But They Are Alert To Drama. They Cannot Bear Description But They Love Landscape And Action.

American Youth Attributes Much More Importance To Arriving At Driver's License Age Than At Voting Age.

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.

The Artist Is The Person Who Invents The Means To Bridge Between Biological Inheritance And The Environments Created By Technological Innovation.

Fish Did Not Discover Water.

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.

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.

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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