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The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan
hannemyr.comWhen we talk about Canadians famous for analyzing new media, we often think of Marshall McLuhan first. With his koan “the medium is the message,” McLuhan synthesized his basic idea: Our tools, from electric light to television to phones, change not just how we communicate, but what we communicate about.
Clive Thompson • Social media is keeping us stuck in the moment
processing information,
Marshall McLuhan • Understanding Media
“The really great privilege of the elites of the future will be to erase the computer information about them, and assume their private identities again.”
Marshall McLuhan, 1969
But McLuhan would say, try not to only think about the fact that we make the tools. Think about how much the tools make us as well.
Marshall McLuhan • Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
technical change alters not only habits of life, but patterns of thought and valuation,
Marshall McLuhan • Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon - Understanding Media_ the Extensions of Man_ Critical Edition-Gingko Press
McLuhan’s view is that mediums matter more than content; it’s the common rules that govern all creation and consumption across a medium that change people and society. Oral culture teaches us to think one way, written culture another. Television turned everything into entertainment and social media taught us to think with the crowd.
Ezra Klein • I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message
I call Trump a Marshall McLuhanesque figure. McLuhan called it, right? He says this mass thing called media, or what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said of the noosphere, is going to so overwhelm evolutionary biology that it will be everything. And Trump understands that. That’s why he watches TV.
David Brooks • My Unsettling Interview With Steve Bannon
The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs.