Thirty years ago this past summer Herbert Marshall McLuhan published Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man, and within a matter of months the book acquired the
standing of Holy Scripture and made of its author the foremost oracle of the age. Seldom
in living memory had so obscure a scholar descended so abruptly from so remote a garret
into the center ring of the celebrity circus, but McLuhan accepted the transformation as if
it were nothing out of the ordinary, nothing more than the inevitable and unsurprising
proof of the hypothesis that he had found in the library at the University of Toronto. He
was fifty-two years old at the time, Canadian by birth and a professor of English
literature. As enigmatic as he was self-preoccupied, he had about him the air of a man
who believed that it was the business of prophets to bring prophetic news, and if he had
peered into the mist of the future and foreseen the passing of the printed word, well, he
had done no more than notice what was both obvious and certain.