McLuhan-like figures in the ’60s—I mentioned 
Buckminster Fuller as one of them. Some people 
would assign the same rank to John Lennon, or 
Bob Dylan, or the young Jack Kennedy. But the 
period, at least in the United States, beginning with 
the assassinations of both Jack and Bobby 
Kennedy, and the loss of the war in Vietnam and 
the disillusions that accompanied the Watergate 
investigations, and a general drawing away form a 
poetic statement towards a systems analysis. 
Historians tend to write less large general histories 
with grand theories than very heavily footnoted 
and narrowly defined tracts. So the impulse has 
been towards retraction. The ’70s were called the