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Media determinism is a philosophical approach towards media technologies which asserts changes in media have a determining effect upon culture. A special subset of technological determinism is media determinism, its quintessence being encapsulated in McLuhan's famous aphorism "the medium is the message" (1964). In this approach the focus is on the technology of mass communication and on how such technology determines the nature of mass communication and its role in society and the lives of people. The McLuhanite insistence on the need for new non-linear ('mosaic'is his term) ways of thinking about new media, which escape the intellectual protocols, procedures and habits of a linear print culture, has been taken up as something of a war cry against the academic media analyst.
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