Q:  You have followed McLuhan’s work for many, 
many years. Can you describe the genesis and 
development of McLuhan’s popularity? It seems he 
was famous for a time, then fell into relative 
decline, and is now being rediscovered.

A:  McLuhan first began publishing a lot in the ’50s, 
and that’s when I started reading, and reading his 
magazine Explorations  and reading his first book, 
The Mechanical Bride . He was a much-discussed, 
extremely controversial figure in Canadian culture 
and among a number of communications 
specialists around the world. But that was all. And 
then in the mid-1960s, perhaps, ’64, ’65, ’66, after