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McLuhan Assignment
Choose one of the Mcluhan quotations below and incorporate it into a design. You must include the actual words of the quotation in the design (either as typographic words, spoken words, or in some other form). The design should be based on the meaning of the quotation. You can use any medium you like (photoshop, illustrator, flash, video, maya, clay sculpture, etc.). Post which quotation you are going to use at onePort, so that two people don't choose the same one. Poets and artists live on frontiers. They have no feedback, only feedforward. We shape our tools and they in turn shape us. I feel that we're standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man's consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos We become what we behold. The effects of new media on our sensory lives are similar to the effects of new poetry. They change not our thoughts but the structure of our world. "The medium is the message" because it is the "medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action." If it works, it's obsolete. The future of the book is the blurb. I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt. The answers are always inside the problem, not outside. The story of modern America begins with the discovery of the white man by the Indians. Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. Whereas convictions depend on speed-ups, justice requires delay. The nature of people demands that most of them be engaged in the most frivolous possible activities -- like making money. With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is "sent." Money is the poor man's credit card. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. Spaceship earth is still operated by railway conductors, just as NASA is managed by men with Newtonian goals. Invention is the mother of necessities. You mean my whole fallacy's wrong? Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth. The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man. Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones? The trouble with a cheap, specialized education is that you never stop paying for it. People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath. The road is our major architectural form. Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade. Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business. The price of eternal vigilance is indifference. News, far more than art, is artifact. When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body. Tomorrow is our permanent address. All advertising advertises advertising. The answers are always inside the problem, not outside. "Camp" is popular because it gives people a sense of reality to see a replay of their lives. This information is top security. When you have read it, destroy yourself. The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy. One of the nicest things about being big is the luxury of thinking little. Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions. The missing link created far more interest than all the chains and explanations of being. 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. When a thing is current, it creates currency. Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs. Men on frontiers, whether of time or space, abandon their previous identities. Neighborhood gives identity. Frontiers snatch it away. The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially. A road is a flattened-out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane. At the speed of light, policies and political parties yield place to charismatic images. |