Turning Point

The early ’50s were years of great creativity for McLuhan—years when his distinctive ideas about media and communications were formulated. The final stimulus for this formulation was provided by McLuhan’s encounter with a professor of political economy at the University of Toronto named Harold Innis. In his books Empire and Communications  and The Bias of Communication  Innis had noted that empires were shaped by their means of communication. Some means emphasized time—writing on stone tablets, for example, which was extremely durable. Other means, such as writing on papyrus, which was much more perishable, but capable of being widely distributed, emphasized space. Empires which used time-biased media were characterized by conservatism, hierarchy and