was only interested in the number of new good 
ideas.

McLuhan probably in that sense will best be 
remembered as a prodder, a thinker, an explorer, 
an iconoclast. It isn’t so much for me his message, 
as the fact that he’s the medium in that situation, 
to use his own phrase to analyze McLuhan. The 
content of what he said may come and go. Some of 
the seeming theory—which he preferred not to call 
that—may seem to date or obsolesce in certain 
ways, and it may, to use his own terms, be 
retrieved at various points if cross-examined from 
a different standpoint. What won’t fade is his