our own period of life and our own period of 
history is transitory, and we are in a very big 
transition, but if anybody was to chart the course 
of that transition, it was McLuhan. And so there 
are two things that are worth exploring here. One 
of them is, why is it that he is coming back to the 
fore now, and why not before? And secondly, is 
the fact that he’s coming back to the fore now 
permanent, or yet another wave of fashion? These 
are good questions to ask oneself. The first 
question, as to why he fell out of fashion, and why 
he was pretty well abandoned—and I don’t mean 
by that the rejection that he was getting all the 
time and has and still is getting from Canada—