Marshall McLuhan: The First Cyberpunk Author?

Whenever I re-read Understanding Media, I am amazed by its brilliance and by its darkness – and by the fact that so little of the book, that many assume they already know because they have heard the aphorisms ‘the medium is the message’ and ‘the global village’, is actually known or understood (to use McLuhan’s phrase). To many, McLuhan is a prophet of the electronic age who predicted the importance of personal computers and the internet; to others, he is a doomed and dangerous apologist who, like his fictional counterpart in Videodrome, Dr O’Blivion, should have died from a TV induced tumor. Neither position catches the deep ambiguity – the hope and the fear – expressed in Understanding Media.