look not only at speech and writing but at all the major means of communication, such as print, radio and television, in the same way he had looked at language. The words in a poem were not important for some concept they conveyed, but for the effect they had on the mind of the reader, which was achieved through their multiple associations. In the same way, a medium such as print could not be understood through a bare description of what it did—reproducing writing in a standard, repeatable form—but through the effect it had on the human psyche.
To understand these effects, McLuhan gather about him a few like-minded colleagues in weekly seminars, financed by a Ford Foundation grant in 1953. The colleague with the greatest influence on McLuhan was an anthropology professor named Edmund Carpenter. Carpenter had lived
