revolution or new religion. But instead, I think what 
was going on was that some of McLuhan’s insights 
had in fact been absorbed by those members of 
the television generation. At the same time, the 
kinds of metaphors that he came up with, such as 
the obvious ones—the “global village,” “the 
medium is the message”—those metaphors never 
went away. Despite the excommunication of 
McLuhan by the academy, those metaphors 
continued to circulate. There weren’t other 
metaphors like that that came along to displace or 
replace them with others that seemed more 
coherent or more academically acceptable. That 
did not happen. There was, to put it the way I think