influential new magazine of the ’90s—signalled this revival by putting his name on their masthead as their “patron saint”. In the fall of 1994, MIT Press also re-issued McLuhan’s Understanding Media , with a new preface by the noted American commentator and editor Lewis Lapham.

There are different reasons for this revival. For the first time since television achieved domination of the culture in the ’50s and ’60s, there is a new wave of technological innovation which seems on the verge of radically re-making our world—a wave signified by the Internet and “Virtual Reality.” Personal computers, first used largely as glorified typewriters, now seem capable of truly linking individuals into an electronic, instantaneous, global communication network.