This article was written exclusively for 
Understanding McLuhan by Liss Jeffrey, based on 
her doctoral thesis.


“All media work us over completely. Any 
understanding of social and cultural change is 
impossible without a knowledge of the way media 
work as environments.” (1967, p.26)

Marshall McLuhan’s stunning catapult to fame in 
the mid 1960s forced a neglected topic onto the 
international agenda for public debate: the 
transformation of cultures by pervasive media