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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.

-Marshall McLuhan

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Professionalism Merges The Individual

Marshall McLuhan

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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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Our Permanent Address Is Tommorrow.

Today It Is Not The Classroom Nor The Classics Which Are The Repositories Of Models Of Eloquence, But The Ad Agencies.

Professionalism Is Environmental. Amateurism Is Anti Environmental. 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 Ground Rules Of Society. The Amateur Can Afford To Loose.

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 Medium Is The Message.

The Space Of Early Greek Cosmology Was Structured By Logos - Resonant Utterance Or Word.

Once Introduced Discontinuity, Once Challenge Any Of The Properties Of Visual Space, And As They Flow From Each Other, The Whole Conceptual Framework Collapses.

The Printing Press Was At First Mistaken For An Engine Of Immortality By Everybody Except Shakespeare.

All Advertising Advertises Advertising.

The Future Of Work Consists Of Learning A Living.

Electricity Does Not Centralize, But Decentralizes.

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.

The Content Or Time-clothing Of Any Medium Or Culture Is The Preceding Medium Or Culture.

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

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

I Wouldn't Have Seen It If I Hadn't Believed It.

For Those For Whom The Sex Act Has Come To Seem Mechanical And Merely The Meeting And Manipulation Of Body Parts, There Often Remains A Hunger Which Can Be Called Metaphysical But Which Is Not Recognized As Such, And Which Seeks Satisfaction In Physical Danger, Or Sometimes In Torture, Suicide, Or Murder.

If The Work Of The City Is The Remaking Or Translating Of Man Into A More Suitable Form Than His Nomadic Ancestors Achieved, Then Might Not Our Current Translation Of Our Entire Lives Into The Spiritual Form Of Information Seem To Make Of The Entire.

Far More Thought And Care Go Into The Composition Of Any Prominent Ad In A Newspaper Or Magazine Than Go Into The Writing Of Their Features And Editorials.

The Global Village Is A Place Of Very Arduous Interfaces And Very Abrasive Situations.

What Is Very Little Understood About The Electronic Age Is That It Angelizes Man, Disembodies Him. Turns Him Into Software.

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

The Mother Tongue Is Propaganda.

The Medium Is The Message" Because It Is The Medium That Shapes And Controls The Search And Form Of Human Associations And Action.

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

The Suddenness Of The Leap From Hardware To Software Cannot But Produce A Period Of Anarchy And Collapse, Especially In The Developed Countries.

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

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

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

On Spaceship Earth There Are No Passengers; Everybody Is A Member Of The Crew. We Have Moved Into An Age In Which Everybody's Activities Affect Everybody Else.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing Is Inevitable If We Are Willing To Contemplate What Is Happening.

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.

The Past Went That-a-way. When Faced With A Totally New Situation, We Tend Always To Attach Ourselves To The Objects, To The Flavor Of The Most Recent Past. We Look At The Present Through A Rear View Mirror. We March Backwards Into The Future.

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

Advertising Business

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

You Can Be A French Canadian Or An English Canadian, But Not A Canadian. We Know How To Live Without An Identity, And This Is One Of Our Marvellous Resources.

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

The Medium Is The Message. This Is Merely To Say That The Personal And Social Consequences Of Any Medium - That Is, Of Any Extension Of Ourselves - Result From The New Scale That Is Introduced Into Our Affairs By Each Extension Of Ourselves, Or By Any New Technology.

As Information Becomes Our Environment, It Becomes Mandatory To Program The Environment Itself As A Work Of Art.

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

The Mark Of Our Time Is Its Revulsion Against Imposed Patterns.

The Tv Camera Has No Shutter. It Does Not Deal With Aspects Or Facets Of Objects In High Resolution. It Is A Means Of Direct Pick-up By The Electrical Groping Over Surfaces.

I Don't Necessarily Agree With Everything I Say.

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.

Television Is Teaching All The Time. Does More Educating Than The Schools And All The Institutions Of Higher Learning.

Every Innovation Scraps Its Immediate Predecessor And Retrieves Still Older Figures – It Causes Floods Of Antiques Or Nostalgic Art Forms And Stimulates The Search For Museum Pieces.

Money Is A Poor Man's Credit Card.

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

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.

The Medium, Or Process, Of Our Time - Electric Technology Is Reshaping And Restructuring Patterns Of Social Interdependence And Every Aspect Of Our Personal Life. It Is Forcing Us To Reconsider And Re-evaluate Practically Every Thought, Every Action.

We Impose The Form Of The Old On The Content Of The New.

Technologies Themselves, Regardless Of Content, Produce A Hemispheric Bias In The Users.

Education In A Technological World Of Replaceable And Expendable Parts Is Neuter.

Diaper Backward Spells Repaid. Think About It.

Publication Is A Self-invasion Of Privacy.

The Future Masters Of Technology Will Have To Be Light-hearted And Intelligent. The Machine Easily Masters The Grim And The Dumb.

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The Price Of Eternal Vigilance Is Indifference.

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

Art Is Anything You Can Get Away With.

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We Drive Into The Future Using Only Our Rearview Mirror.

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

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A Typewriter Is A Means Of Transcribing Thought, Not Expressing It.

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.

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

Whence Did The Wond'rous Mystic Art Arise, / Of Painting Speech, And Speaking To The Eyes? / That We By Tracing Magic Lines Are Taught, / How To Embody, And To Colour Thought?

Once You See The Boundaries Of Your Environment, They Are No Longer The Boundaries Of Your Environment.

A Light Bulb Creates An Environment By Its Mere Presence.

Affluence Creates Poverty.

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The Percept Takes Priority Of The Concept.

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

A Moral Point Of View Too Often Serves As A Substitute For Understanding In Technological Matters.

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Language Is A Form Of Organized Stutter.

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

Most People Are Alive In An Earlier Time, But You Must Be Alive In Our Own Time.

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

Until Writing Was Invented, Man Lived In Acoustic Space: Boundless, Directionless, Horizonless, In The Dark Of The Mind, In The World Of Emotion.

The Task Confronting Contemporary Man Is To Live With The Hidden Ground Of His Activities As Familiarly As Our Literate Predecessors Lived With The Figure Minus Ground.

The Fall Or Scrapping Of A Cultural World Puts Us All Into The Same Archetypal Cesspool, Engendering Nostalgia For Earlier Conditions.

Primitivism Has Become The Vulgar Cliché Of Much Modern Art And Speculation.

Where The Whole Man Is Involved There Is No Work. Work Begins With The Division Of Labor.

Division Of Labor

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

Characteristics

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.

We Go Forward Looking In The Rearview Mirror.

Rearview Mirror

The Cave Art Of Madison Avenue Has Been By Far The Most Innovative And Educative Art Form Of The Twentieth Century.

The More The Data Banks Record About Each One Of Us, The Less We Exist.

The Real News Is Bad News.

Darkness Is To Space What Silence Is To Sound, I.e., The Interval.

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.

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

It Is Always The Psychic And Social Grounds, Brought Into Play By Each Medium Or Technology, That Readjust The Balance Of The Hemispheres And Of Human Sensibilities Into Equilibrium With Those Grounds.

Since With Electricity We Extend Our Central Nervous System Globally, Instantly Interrelating Every Human Experience.

Human Experience

The New Is Always Made Up Of The Old, Or Rather, What People See In The New Is Always The Old Thing. The Rear-view Mirror. The Future Of The Future Is The Present, And This Is Something That People Are Terrified Of.

Ideally, Advertising Aims At The Goal Of A Programmed Harmony Among All Human Impulses And Aspirations And Endeavors. Using Handicraft Methods, It Stretches Out Toward The Ultimate Electronic Goal Of A Collective Consciousness.

All Media Work Us Over Completely.

Cultural Change

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.

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

All Meaning Alters With Acceleration, Because All Patterns Of Personal And Political Interdependence Change With Any Acceleration Of Information.

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

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.

Most Of Our Assumptions Have Outlived Their Uselessness.

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

All The New Media Are Art Forms Which Have The Power Of Imposing, Like Poetry, Their Own Assumptions.

Everybody Experiences Far More Than He Understands. Yet It Is Experience, Rather Than Understanding, That Influences Behavior.

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

In Jesus Christ, There Is No Distance Or Separation Between The Medium And The Message: It Is The One Case Where We Can Say That The Medium And The Message Are Fully One And The Same.

Literacy, The Visual Technology, Dissolved The Tribal Magic By Means Of Its Stress On Fragmentation And Specialization And Created The Individual.

The School System Is The Homogenizing Hopper Into Which We Toss Our Integral Tots For Processing.

Human Perception Is Literally Incarnation.

Relativity Theory Forced The Abandonment, In Principle, Of Absolute Space And Absolute Time.

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.

In An Age Of Multiple And Massive Innovations, Obsolescence Becomes The Major Obsession.

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.

Such Is The Content Of The Mental Life Of The Hemingway Hero And The Good Guy In General. Every Day He Gets Beaten Into A Servile Pulp By His Own Mechanical Reflexes, Which Are Constantly Busy Registering And Reacting To The Violent Stimuli Which His Big, Noisy, Kinesthetic Environment Has Provided For His Unreflective Reception.

One Thing About Which Fish Know Exactly Nothing Is Water, Since They Have No Anti-environment Which Would Enable Them To Perceive The Element They Live In.

Moral Indignation Is A Technique Used To Endow The Idiot With Dignity.

We Are All Robots When Uncritically Involved With Our Technologies.

The Student Of Media Soon Comes To Expect The New Media Of Any Period Whatever To Be Classed As 'pseudo' By Those Who Acquired The Patterns Of Earlier Media, Whatever They May Happen To Be.

To See A Man Slip On A Banana Skin Is To See A Rationally Structured System Suddenly Translated Into A Whirling Machine.

All Words, In Every Language, Are Metaphors.

Attention Spans Get Very Weak At The Speed Of Light, And That Goes Along With A Very Weak Identity.

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

The Poet, The Artist, The Sleuth, Whoever Sharpens Our Perception Tends To Antisocial; Rarely 'well Adjusted,' He Cannot Go Along With Currents And Trends.

The Criminal, Like The Artist, Is A Social Explorer.

I Do Not Say Whether It Is A Good Or Bad Thing. To Do So Would Be Meaningless And Arrogant.

I May Be Wrong, But I'm Never In Doubt.

Our Technology Forces Us To Live Mythically

The Tribalizing Power Of The New Electronic Media, The Way In Which They Return To Us To The Unified Fields Of The Old Oral Cultures, To Tribal Cohesion And Pre-individualist Patterns Of Thought, Is Little Understood. Tribalism Is The Sense Of The Deep Bond Of Family, The Closed Society As The Norm Of Community.

The Name Of A Man Is A Numbing Blow From Which He Never Recovers.

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.

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.

The Circuited City Of The Future Will Not Be The Huge Hunk Of Concentrated Real Estate Created By The Railway. It Will Take On A Totally New Meaning Under Conditions Of Very Rapid Movement. It Will Be An Information Megalopolis.

Ads Are Carefully Designed By The Madison Avenue Frog-men Of-the-mind For Semiconscious Exposure.

With The Arrival Of Electric Technology, Man Extended, Or Set Outside Himself, A Live Model Of The Central Nervous System Itself. To The Degree That This Is So, It Is A Development That Suggests A Desperate And Suicidal Autoamputation, As If The Central Nervous System Could No Longer Depend On The Physical Organs To Be Protective Buffers Against The Slings And Arrows Of Outrageous Mechanism.

Fish Did Not Discover Water.

Canada Is The Only Country In The World That Knows How To Live Without An Identity.

Sentimentality, Like Pornography, Is Fragmented Emotion; A Natural Consequence Of A High Visual Gradient In Any Culture.

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.

For The Satiated, Both Sex And Speed Are Pretty Boring Until The Element Of Danger And Even Death Is Introduced.

In Large Measure, Writing Is The Spatialization Of Thought.

Language As The Technology Of Human Extension, Whose Powers Of Division And Separation We Know So Well, May Have Been The "tower Of Babel" By Which Men Sought To Scale The Highest Heavens. Today Computers Hold Out The Promise Of A Means Of Instant Tr

When Information Overload Occurs, Pattern Recognition Is How To Determine Truth.

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.

Television Brought The Brutality Of War Into The Comfort Of The Living Room. Vietnam Was Lost In The Living Rooms Of America - Not On The Battlefields Of Vietnam.

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

In Antiquity And The Middle Ages Reading Was Necessarily Reading Aloud.

Innumerable Confusions And A Feeling Of Despair Invariably Emerge In Periods Of Great Technological And Cultural Transition.

The Media Have Substituted Themselves For The Older World.

Jokes Are Grievances.

When Things Come At You Very Fast, Naturally You Lose Touch With Yourself.

Scribal Culture And Gothic Architecture Were Both Concerned With Light Through, Not Light On.

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

The 'expert' Is The Man Who Stays Put.

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

The Ignorance Of How To Use Knowledge Stockpiles Exponentially.

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.

When Information Rubs Against Information The Results Are Startling And Effective. The Perrenial Quest For Involvement, Fill-in, Takes Many Forms.

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.

When New Technologies Impose Themselves On Societies Long Habituated To Older Technologies, Anxieties Of All Kinds Result.

Technology Is That Which Separates Us From Our Environment.

Time’ Has Ceased, 'space' Has Vanished. We Now Live In A Global Village... A Simultaneous Happening

The Spoken Word Was The First Technology By Which Man Was Able To Let Go Of His Environment In Order To Grasp It In A New Way.

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.

Information And Images Bump Against Each Other Every Day In Massive Quantities, And The Resonance Of This Interfacing Is Like The Babble Of A Village Or Tavern Gossip Session.

The Answers Are Always Inside The Problem, Not Outside.

"work" Does Not Exist In A Nonliterate World. The Primitive Hunter Or Fisherman Did No Work, Any More Than Does The Poet, Painter, Or Thinker Of Today. Where The Whole Man Is Involved There Is No Work.

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

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.

Those Conspiracies That Are Too Incredible To Be Believed, Are By The Same Right, Those Which Most Often Succeed.

Current Illusion Is That Science Has Abolished All Natural Laws.

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.

Madison Avenue Is A Very Powerful Aggression Against Private Consciousness. A Demand That You Yield Your Private Consciousness To Public Manipulation.

Phenomenology Is Dialectic In Ear-mode - A Massive And Decentralized Quest For Roots, For Ground.

In Big Industry New Ideas Are Invited To Rear Their Heads So They Can Be Clobbered At Once. The Idea Department Of A Big Firm Is A Sort Of Lab For Isolating Dangerous Viruses.

I'm Not Sure Who Discovered Water, But I'm Pretty Sure It Wasn't A Fish.

The Electric Light Is Pure Information. It Is A Medium Without A Message

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