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Marshall McLuhan

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Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.

 
Marshall McLuhan

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The new electric environment of simultaneous and diversified information creates acoustic man. He is surrounded by sound – from behind, from the side, from above. His environment is made up of information in all kinds of simultaneous forms, and he puts on this electric environment as we put on our clothes, or as the fish puts on water.

 
Marshall McLuhan
 

The point about digitization, just to explain what I mean by that, is the way that information is no longer a physical commodity. It doesn't have a mass like it used to. So it used to be that if you wanted to leak a bunch of documents, you physically had to carry away these huge boxes of documents and then you had to physically photocopy them somehow. And they had this physical mass, and it was through that mass that they could be controlled by people in power. When information is digitized, it loses that mass for the most part. It becomes almost ephemeral, it's like an idea; it's like a thought. And it spreads and it can be shared almost instantaneously. So you can take that, and then you combine it with the internet, which is this web in which everybody is talking to each other and sharing information. And you've got the makings of what I think is a digital revolution, which nobody quite knows how to handle it, what to do with it.

 
Heather Brooke
 

The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.

 
Marshall McLuhan
 

Because of what computers commonly do... With the exception of the electric light, there never has been a technology that better exemplifies Marshall McLuhan's aphorism "The medium is the message." ...the "message" of computer technology is comprehensive and domineering. The computer argues, to put it baldly, that the most serious problems confronting us at both personal and professional levels require technical solutions through fast access to information otherwise unavailable. ...this is... nonsense. Our most serious problems are not technical, nor do they arise from inadequate information. If a nuclear catastrophe occurs, it shall not be because of inadequate information. Where people are dying of starvation, it does not occur because of inadequate information. If families break up, children are mistreated, crime terrorizes a city, education is impotent, it does not happen because of inadequate information. Mathematical equations, instantaneous communication, and vast quantities of information have nothing whatever to do with any of these problems. And the computer is useless in addressing them.

 
Neil Postman
 

Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric rain.

 
Hans Christian von Baeyer
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