effects of media and technologies. This job has 
barely begun. During the 1980s, scholars such as 
Meyrowitz (1984) and Greenfield (1984) took up 
McLuhan’s invitation to explore further, and make 
his general insights more precise. Stephen Kern’s 
(1983) The Culture of Time and Space  retraces in 
detail the cultural transformations of the early 
20th century, sensitive to the general dynamics of 
media and techno-cultural change. McLuhan 
receives a couple of sympathetic lines, but his 
spirit hovers in the background.

The efforts of these scholars, and other 
academics and critics (eg. Tichi 1991, Birkerts 1994)