A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
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One of the effects, therefore, of the great speedup of change in human arrangements, is well expressed in the popular saying, “If it works, it’s obsolete.”
“Great Change-overs for You”, 1966, p 33
Year: 1966
[I]n an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
“Innovation Is Obsolete”, in Evergreen Review, Vol. 15, No. 90, June (1971), p 64
Year: 1971
…television will not be understood until it too has become obsolete. At the moment of obsolescence, anything becomes an art form. And then it is possible to do something very good with it.
“Jean Pare interview”, in Forces magazine a Hydro Quebec publication, No.22, (1973), p 17
Year: 1973
Not “obsolete” but “obsolescent” is the term that applies to my analysis of the present state of the printed book. Obsolescence often precedes an extraordinary development in technology. The arrival of electric xerography certainly does not mean the end of the book, but rather a great enlargement of it scope and function. Earlier, photo-engraving and also photography had transformed the world of typography and of book production.
Letter to the Editor, Life magazine, March 1, 1966, in Letters (1987), p 334
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Book
Money is obsolete because it stores work (and work, as we have seen, is itself obsolete). In a work-less, non-specialist society money is useless. What you need is a credit card, which is information.
“The Agenbite of Outwit”, In Location Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1963), p 121, reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research: Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 125
Year: 1963
Chapter:
Money
The clock amplifies work. Until the clock was invented, what we call work was almost impossible to organize. It obsolesces leisure.
“Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, 1979, in Understanding Me (2003), p 288
Year: 1979
This is the nature of acoustic space, which is constituted by its centre being everywhere and its margin being nowhere. Without the microphone the speaker is at a single centre, while with the microphone he is everywhere simultaneously — a fact which obsolesces the architecture of our existing churches.
“Liturgy and the Microphone”, 1974, in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 110
Year: 1974
Drawn to McLuhan #12
The structure of our churches is obsolesced by the multi-directional media speaker system, and the older distance between speaker and audience is gone.
“Liturgy and the Microphone”, (1974), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 114
Year: 1974
Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance. The book never had it so good. But it is no longer constitutive of the culture we live in. The book will abound and superabound in the next few decades because it is obsolete. Obsolescence is not extinction, it's superabundance.
“Theatre and the Visual Arts: a Panel Discussion”, in Yeats Studies: An International Journal, Issue 2 (1972), p 135
Year: 1972
Innovation is obsolete, so is obsolescence, as information speed-up transforms man and his world into an art form.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 297
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Innovation
Prominence is the harbinger of obsolescence.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 234
Year: 1972
But the wheel retracts into the airplane in flight. Beyond a certain speed the wheel is useless; it retracts into animal form again. All technology can become obsolescent in this way, by simply pushing it to a higher pitch.
“Prospect” (1962), p 365
Year: 1962
Strangely, in so progressive an age, when change has become the only constant in our lives, we never ask, "Is the car here to stay?" The answer, of course, is "No." In the electric age, the wheel itself is obsolescent.
Understanding Media, (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 152
Year: 1964
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything—it's just the beginning. Take the motor car as an example.
Letter to Frank Sheed, February 20, 1970, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 398
Year: 1970
Handwriting has been obsolescent since printing and typewriter, but there is a great deal more handwriting done daily now than was ever done before printing, or the typewriter.
Letter to the Toronto Globe and Mail, June 17, 1970, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 410
Year: 1970
The mere obsolescence of the wheel does not mean its disappearance.
Understanding Media, (1964), MIT/Routledge, p 220
Year: 1964
Today, electric technology scraps mechanical industry while retrieving the most primal modes of human consciousness.
Letter to Eric Havelock, May 22, 1970, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 406
Year: 1970
The mere fact that "we are always ready to fight the last war" is itself a kind of orientation so that the state of any art or science is necessarily one of varying degrees of obsolescence.
Letter to John Polanyi, January 4, 1974, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 487
Year: 1974
Today, when the greatest volume of transport consists in the moving of information, the wheel and the road are undergoing recession and obsolescence; but in the first instance, given the pressure for, and from, wheels, there had to be roads to accommodate them.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 93
Year: 1964
Today not only clock-time, but the wheel itself, is obsolescent and is retracting into animal form under the impulse of greater and greater speeds.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge, p 152
Year: 1964
Strangely, in so progressive an age, when change has become the only constant i n our lives, we never ask, "Is the car here to stay?" The answer, of course, is "No. " In the electric age, the wheel itself is obsolescent.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge, p 220
Year: 1964
The Sputnik event was another thing altogether which simply obsolesced the planet itself as nature disappeared into an art form.
The End of Work Ethic, 1972, in Understanding Me (2003), p 200
Year: 1972
That is, political parties and their explicit policies have simply been obsolesced by the images presented by the party leaders on the one hand, and the services taken for granted by the community, regardless of the party that happens to be in power, on the other hand.
“The End of Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me, 2003, p 203
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Chiasmus, Flips, Reversals | Politics and Government
Just now, our youngsters have been completely taken over by the electric world, which is acoustic, intuitive, holistic, that is, global and total — a new world that has obsolesced our old scientific world with its quantities, its size, our over-industrialized First World.
“Religion and Youth” (Interview, Pierre Babin), 1977, in The Medium and the Light, (1999), p 95
Year: 1977
Once again, money obsolesces barter, or the swapping of unlike items, which may or may not be perishable.
The Global Village, with Bruce Powers, (1989), p19
Year: 1989
Today, when the greatest volume of transport consists in the moving of information, the wheel and the road are undergoing recession and obsolescence; but in the first in -stance, given the pressure for, and from, wheels, there had to be roads to accommodate them.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 93
Year: 1964
When information moves at the speed of signals in the central nervous system, man is confronted with the obsolescence of all earlier forms of acceleration, such as road and rail.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge, p 103
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Speedups
At the high point of obsolescence, conspicuous consumption displays itself most readily, such as Louis the Fourteenth's gold service or Trimalchio's extravagant mock Roman funerals.
The Global Village, with Bruce Powers, (1989), p19
Year: 1989
The phonetic alphabet obsolesced the oral culture of Greece, as is explained in Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, (1989), p 59
Year: 1989
Coaxial cable has been obsolesced. Open wireless transmission, being truly acoustic, is a group voice.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers (1989), p 119
Year: 1989
Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It’s called being mass man.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977), in Understanding Me, 2003, p 268
Year: 1977
Technology stresses and emphasizes some one function of man's senses; at the same time, other senses are dimmed down or temporarily obsolesced.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, 1989, p 3
Year: 1989
Chapter:
Senses
Obsolescence is a major reality in this kind of world of business turnover.
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 156
Year: 1951
Naturally, therefore, they are the conditions of planned obsolescence, which are fostered, consciously and unconsciously, by every commercial agency of production, publicity, and entertainment.
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 92
Year: 1951
Accelerated change and planned obsolescence constitute the basic principle of an industrial power-economy built on applied science. Production for use? Yes. But for the briefest possible use consistent with the rigging of the market for the pyramiding of profits.
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 128
Year: 1951
The photograph enhances pictorial realism and obsolesces portrait painting. The vacuum cleaner obsolesces the broom and the beater, the dryer pushes aside the clothes-line, and the washer the washboard and tub; the refrigerator replaces the icebox and the root cellar. Some forms are so evanescent they have their own built-in obsolescence.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), pp 99-100
Year: 1988
Obsolescence is not the end of anything, it's the beginning of aesthetics, the cradle of Taste, of eloquence and of slang.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 100
Year: 1988
The President needs me. I don’t know what our President would do without me. Claude Bissel that is, the President of dear old Toronto University, not Iike the President of the United States, who by the way I do not like. Claude has asked me to give his advisory group of senior academics the benefit of my views on the changes in higher learning necessitated by the electric age. It pains me to think of the changes sweeping through our leather-patched, tweed-ridden, and chalk-dusty world of which this august body is totally oblivious. No matter, it is my duty to tell them what they do not know. In short they are obsolete. I wonder how they will take the news.
Letter to Claude Bissel, Jan 4, 1961, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 279
Year: 1961
Chapters:
Education | McLuhan on McLuhan
Here [in the world of photography] is a world of obsolescence as surely doomed to swift erosion as was the enterprise of the buggy- and wagon-makers in 1915.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge, p 195
Year: 1964
When the electric speed is introduced into such a delegated and representational organization, this obsolescent organization [the newspaper] can only be made to function by a series of subterfuges and makeshifts.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge, p 204
Year: 1964
I once spent several months studying obsolescence as the matrix of innovation.
Untitled Essay in On Growth, ed., W. L. Oltmans, 1974, p 4
Year: 1974
Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped.
“The Concept of Space in Art”, 1970
Year: 1970
And this strange processing of old forms by new forms tends, in some cases, to strengthen the old forms considerably. For example, one of the effects of automation on libraries and catalogs is to enormously increase the whole cataloging activity. Unexpectedly, instead of supplanting it, it has increased it enormously.
“The Meaning of TV to Children”, 1965, p 48
Year: 1965
[After the car] The horse returned on a much greater scale as sport and entertainment. The car is already becoming an art form in the same mode of obsolescence. The car is now becoming costume.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 248
Year: 1972
Most people think obsolescence means the end. It means the beginning. People always live in obsolescent frames of mind and obsolescent technologies. Only the artist can afford to live in the present, and for that privilege he pays a heavy price.
“The Global Theatre”, in Ekistics 190 (Sept 1971), p182.
Year: 1971
…transportation may not be the reason for the continuance of the car at all. Obsolescence is a very large and mysterious subject which has had very little attention in relation to its importance.
“Innovation Is Obsolete,” Evergreen Review, 1971, p 64
Year: 1971