To say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.
Marshall McluhanRead
The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.
Interpretation
Media shapes our perception of reality, creating its own immediate form of truth.
Marshall McLuhan's quote emphasizes the idea that television news creates a distinct reality for its viewers. While it does not replace the actual world, it crafts an immediate experience that shapes how people understand and interact with reality, underscoring the powerful influence of media on public perception and cognition.
In practice
In a discussion about media influence, one might quote McLuhan to emphasize how news can distort perceptions.
To say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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.
Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.
The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely 'well adjusted,' he cannot go along with currents and trends.
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions β they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.
The question of questions for the politicians should ever be-What type of social structure am I tending to produce? But this is a question he never entertains.
How characteristic of your perverse heart that longs only for what happens to be out of reach.
It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil.
It is in the thick of calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence.
We should not view men with a cynical eye, seeing them only as meaningless products of chance, but, on the other hand, we should not go to the opposite extreme of seeing them romantically. To do either is to fail to understand who men really are--creatures made in the image of God but fallen.
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