“Everybody experiences far more than he 
understands. Yet it is experience, rather than 
understanding, that influences behaviour, 
especially in collective matters of media and 
technology, where the individual is almost 
inevitably unaware of their effect upon him.” (1964, 
p.318)

McLuhan as intellectual can be appraised as a 20th 
century contributor to an ancient hermeneutic 
enterprise, the understanding of understanding. 
Once re-read, his work provides an original 
hypothesis about how we come to understand as 
we do. From the horizon of the 1990s, a central