McLuhan is fascinating to me. A lot of the criticisms people level against him are correct- much of his writing is composed of terse declarative statements that

McLuhan is fascinating to me. A lot of the criticisms people level against him are correct- much of his writing is composed of terse declarative statements that sound deep and insightful, but aren't really backed up by much. It's like reading a series of bombshell opening statements about different topics, but instead of following up with arguments to flesh out those statements, he just moves on to another bombshell opening statement about some other issue that also doesn't get fleshed out. A lot of people take that to mean that's it's all fluff, but I think that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He was known to keep track of ideas on index cards- something interesting would occur to him, so he'd make an index card for that concept, and flesh it out with more thoughts on the topic, sketches, etc. He would then pick out a related set of index cards as the basis for a book. So, his process went a long way towards defining the structure of his books. So, it's true that his books tend to be a loosely-connected series of concepts presented in an evocative and profound-sounding manner, but never fully fleshed out. But they're often great food for thought- maybe he doesn't go into sufficient detail, but they're full of nuggets of intellectual goodness that are great starting points for thinking about modern media and the flow of information in the modern world (even if the end result is coming to the conclusion that he was wrong about something).