The controversial Canadian media intellectual Marshall McLuhan first began to garner public attention with his book The Mechanical Bridge in 1951, precisely during the time when North America was first gripped by and attempting to come to grips with the influence of television programming and advertising on society. One of McLuhan's core theses was that every communication medium, including the television, has inherent effects apart from those that any artist or businessperson willfully creates through it and that these effects are not always positive.
McLuhan achieved the height of public attention in part by emulating the advertisers he studied, inventing memorable phrases to convey his points (such as "the medium is the message," "turn on, tune in, drop out," and "global village"). Arguably, however, he never expected or even hoped to deflect substantially the tide of the technological and social forces in play at the time. He likened the successful reader of his works to the sailor in Edgar Allan Poe's story "A Descent into the Maelstrom," who saves himself by studying a whirlpool and by moving with, not against, its current.
The media thinker's legacy is in equal parts inevitable and inconsequential. The advent of the internet, which he had predicted thirty years prior, and of subsequent technologies would force society to broaden its perspective of media channels and examine their impact more closely. On the other hand, in the present milieu, where