McLuhan’s career, his rise to fame, and your own 
pop culture status. 

A:  I also consider McLuhan a great personal role 
model for me because he was a professor, a very 
learned man, who suddenly was caught in the 
public spotlight, and then was seen everywhere. 
Suddenly he was in this magazine and that 
magazine. He was taken up by journalists. People 
would call him up and ask him questions on all 
kinds of topics from the simple to the abstruse 
and so on. We haven’t had anyone like that—
before me—since McLuhan. It’s odd. One had 
thought that McLuhan was the harbinger of a