Well, he saw what was coming, and now we are awash in an information bath. MM was less punchy in his writing in this early work, but the vision of our future was begining to take shape. This is a useful book for those who wish to be media historians. ( )

Marshall McLuhan is the challenge author for the month of February for this year's Canadian book read. As he was a communications theorist, I'm sure I've read his work when I was film theory student.

Culture Is Our Business by Marshall McLuhan is a dialectical journal on the state of Western advertising as a reflection of culture at the close of the 1960s. Now separated from the source material, these quips read more like free verse slam poetry than responses to images and slogans that were at one point ubiquitous.

Now, though, looking back at a slice of popular (primarily American, though there are some Canadian, British, and European ads included) culture as represented by headlines, full page (black and white) ads and slogans, it's difficult to assess sometimes which are the quotes and which are the responses. So I'm sure a portion (and it might be as high as 50%)

But there were moments when I could see the same old dialog that is still being bandied about — especially worries about the current generation of youth or expectations that they will be fundamentally different because of "new media." Think now of the high expectations we put on Millennials at the expense of the previous generations. I'm apparently too old to know how to use a computer or a Smart Phone but my children are somehow genetically programmed to do both from birth (both are fallacies).

As this is such a dense book, I did some live micro-blogging of what I was reading on my Tumblr site. ( )