Although many people know him only as the man who stepped out from behind the movie placard in the Woody Allen film, Annie Hall, Marshall McLuhan is experiencing an intellectual and popular rebirth in the 1990s.
Considered the guru of the electronic age and heralded as a genius on a plateau with Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, McLuhan enjoyed worldwide notoriety in the 1960s and '70s. His book Understanding Media thrust the University of Toronto English professor into the media spotlight.

His provocative, original, and often exasperating theories on the effects of electronic media on individuals and society were so new and so unusual that he was simultaneously branded as a prophet and a charlatan. Either way, McLuhan became the decade's instant media expert. He was wooed by major corporations--Madison Avenue executives hung on his every word--and academia, though skeptical, showered him with prestigious positions and awards.
McLuhan coauthored a string of books after Understanding Media. He continued to write and expand upon his theories, or as he preferred to call them, probes, and continued to baffle and perplex many with his aphoristic and cryptic style. Given the current explosion of technology--the Internet, video conferencing, bulletin board services, cyberspace, virtual reality--now is a perfect time to reevaluate McLuhan. This CD-ROM is an excellent vehicle for examining and illuminating McLuhan's ideas and personality, and a tool people can use to help make sense of our changing technology, and how it changes our world.