Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CCwas a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. He was educated at the University of Manitoba and Cambridge University and began his teaching career as a Professor of English at several universities in the U.S. and Canada, before moving to the University of Toronto where he would remain for the...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 July 1911
CityEdmonton, Canada
CountryCanada
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
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.
Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands.
People don't actually read newspapers - they get into them every morning like a hot bath.
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.
Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.
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.
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.
[On Jimmy Carter] "Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place.
Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product.
People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.
the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions
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.
There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends,