quotations endlessly turning electronic pages with 
quotes by and about McLuhan. Sure, but I think 
that the controversy did something else that 
relates to our trajectory, and that is that for the 
generation after the TV baby generation, for 
people who came of age when television really was 
part of the environment—for many of these 
people, the controversy helped McLuhan because 
he was like an outlaw figure. Sure McLuhan didn’t 
give you some rote ordered thing that was going 
to explain it all, but when you turned around and 
looked for people who’d really been talking about 
technocultural transformations, there weren’t a 
lot of them. He seemed to have again a certain kind