brain cell. This wasn’t McLuhan’s approach. His 
approach was, I’m going to give you these 
juxtapositions, I’m going to give you these erudite 
references. You’ve got to do some of the work to 
put it together, also to test it out. He wasn’t giving 
you gospel; he was giving you some tools for 
thinking about what’s going on. It was up to you to 
apply them, as it’s up to us now that he’s gone, to 
apply and keep testing some of what he was 
talking about. But in that sense, he will never have 
a system that is going to satisfy everyone, so 
there certainly his critics have a point. The 
question of power, I do think, is one that bears 
investigation. The question of power—I think we