fashion, but will he have a lasting impact? Will his 
thinking have resonance in the future?

A:  I think, as I thought for a long time, that 
posterity will be pretty cruel to McLuhan. He made 
a horrible mistake—he didn’t write the “big book”. 
He didn’t write the book that takes four or five 
years in which you test your ideas and you find 
out which ideas are meaningless and which of them 
are valid. You sort the good ones from the bad 
ones, and try and build a synthesis out of a career 
of thinking. He didn’t write that book, so there’s 
nowhere that his admirers can tell people to go 
and say read that—that’s what Marshall’s got to