I guess I go back and I’m a McLuhan skeptic for 
probably silly reasons: I had a bizarre encounter 
over the telephone with him when I was a junior 
editor at The Globe & Mail  and he had written a 
piece which I didn’t understand—the first sentence 
right up to the last sentence—but I knew my duty, 
and I had to phone him for some clarifications that 
a senior editor had asked for, and I read the 
clarifications to him, and all I could remember him 
saying was, “McLuhan wouldn’t have said that, 
McLuhan would have said this,” and I realized that 
anyone who talks about themselves in the third 
person singular has slightly lost it. But I realized 
that I was talking to the guru of the age so I