always that it was when he turned to the study of 
newsprint and he was looking at newspapers and 
he realized that, yes, there were these things, 
namely timber from Canada, that had to circulate. 
But then once you got into the realm of 
newspapers circulating you realized you were 
dealing with a very different kind of staple and 
that’s of course when he arrived at many of his 
ideas about bias of communication.

With McLuhan—let’s keep in mind he was born in 
1911, lived in the West, an area where 
communications was unquestionably central to 
daily life, and certainly central to the life of