These developments have sharpened our sense that an old-fashioned, content-based approach is inadequate to understanding technology. A comprehensive, effects- oriented approach—an attempt to grasp the whole pattern of change, including the innumerable and often ignored side effects of technological development—seems much more fitting. And McLuhan is the master of this approach.

In addition, the more profound consequences of broadcast technology, multiplied by cable and satellite transmission, can no longer be ignored. And these consequences increasingly answer to McLuhan’s description of them. A new world of violent and unreflective tribalism, whether represented by Los Angeles street gangs or armies in Bosnia, has been directly traced to the decline of literacy and the ascendancy of television by such scholars as Barry