A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Well, when things change at very high speeds, a need for continuity develops. You see, you're in such a complete discontinuity at high speed. Everything you're looking at now is gone in a second and our demands are to hang on to older things. So the antique stores and the love of taking the varnish off of old tables, revealing their original state, and that sort of thing is a passion today. In order toy' think, you have to forget most of what you are experiencing in order to relate it to earlier things that you knew, otherwise you can't infer anything from what you are seeing. So, at the speed of light, which is now the normal speed of most information, on TV, radio, telephone and so on—at that speed the need to forget has become a form of nostalgia.
Interview with Jerry Brown in The CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1977-1978, p 178
Year: 1977
Chapter: Speedups
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan