philosophers, others had neglected the effects of 
technology within culture historically. That had not 
happened, not just media we must remember, but 
also technologies. There was a reason for that, 
argued McLuhan, and he attempted to redress this 
balance.

The other thing that happens, where we bring 
together both what some scholars have seen in 
McLuhan and where their applications have come 
from, and where McLuhan’s grand vision of all 
these historical patterns really has a relevance for 
now, is that when he described the more recent 
shift—that is the earlier ones of orality to literacy,