The medium is us

“We become what we behold  . . . We shape our tools and, afterward, our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan

Periodically, I see a query about what person, living or dead, you would most like as a dinner partner. High on my list is Marshall McLuhan.

In college, I was captivated by the ideas of McLuhan, a little-known English literature professor in Toronto who burst onto the scene in the 1960s with radical ideas about how the media was shaping our world. He’s been credited with introducing today’s concept of media into the lexicon. He coined the phrase “the global village” and “the Age of Information.” He posited that technology was enlarging our world and simultaneously making it smaller. But the technologies he was considering were television, radio, and Xerox machines.