A Natural History of Media—McLuhan’s Method
1. Introduction: Literary Style or Research Method? Marshall McLuhan (1911–1982) was the most influential and at the same time the most controversial media thinker of the twentieth century. As a pioneer or founding figure of the media ecology school, his reputation rose and fell dramatically: he was once elevated to the altar, and then quickly neglected and forgotten. With the dawn of the network age, he came once again to be widely known in academic circles and indeed throughout the cultural world as a “prophet-sage,” yet some still regard him as a mountebank who merely uses gibberish to hoodwink the public. These two images are not really contradictory. So-called prophets…
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