of Pound and Eliot, had exhibited the first symptoms of this state of affairs.
As the ’50s wore on, McLuhan began to find more and more audiences receptive to his explorations, although most remained skeptical concerning his actual conclusions. In 1959 the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) in the United States asked McLuhan to develop a syllabus for the study of media in schools—a project which became the nucleus of his most famous work, Understanding Media . It was during an address at a 1958 convention of the NAEB that McLuhan first uttered, in a highly public forum, his famous phrase, “the medium is the message”—meaning, among other things, that all media have effects on the human psyche quite apart from the explicit bits of information they might convey.
