Photos by Todd McLellan.

On February 1, 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia came apart somewhere over Texas, reminding us that putting people into space is hard to do and very, very dangerous. Engineers determined a piece of foam that broke off during launch had damaged the heat shield on one of the wings. NASA knew about it almost immediately and for the two weeks Columbia was orbiting Earth, they worked overtime with the Boeing Corporation to figure out whether or not they had a real problem on their hands, wedging their findings and analysis into about 28 slides’ worth of PowerPoint. One of those slides included the word “significant” five times, as in “can cause significant damage.” The gist was that yes, this could be a “significant” issue, but it’s also “significantly” outside the test parameters, so there’s no way to be certain. The bit of the slide that emphasized there was good cause for concern was a bullet point nested under a bullet point nested under a bullet point, which is the most PowerPoint-y way to display information.

The interpretation of the deck was that the risk to the craft and its astronauts was minimal. The misunderstanding stemmed from PowerPoint itself—the way we use it and how it inherently shapes content. “How is it that each elaborate architecture of thought always fits exactly on one slide?” writes American statistician Edward Tufte in his essay, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” (emphasis his). “Medieval in its preoccupation with hierarchical distinctions, the PowerPoint format signals every bullet’s status in four or five different simultaneous ways: by the order in sequence, extent of indent, size of bullet, style of bullet, and size of type associated with various bullets. This is a lot of insecure formatting for a simple engineering problem.” Presenting the problem in PowerPoint stripped it of gravity, because PowerPoint is an unserious tool. If something is really important, surely it would be presented using words in sentences and paragraphs, in robust reports with nuance and elaboration, not decks with bullets and fun slide transitions. The smartest minds on the planet were thwarted by presentation software. Seven people died.

But blaming the software is unfair. It wasn’t buggy. On the contrary, PowerPoint always works exactly as it’s designed to work. The error was with people. It’s not about the specific people who looked at the slide that said “significant damage” and thought, “I’m sure it’s fine.” It’s about all of us. The problem is who we’ve become in a world where PowerPoint exists.

***

When trying to describe Marshall McLuhan’s ideas in a 1967 Saturday Review article, John Culkin wrote, “We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” We love to make things, but it is our things that come to define us. We make the thing, then we turn into people who have the thing. We made PowerPoint, then we became people who have PowerPoint.

McLuhan made a career of saying smart and prescient things. But it’s the thing he’s most known for—“the medium is the message”—that keeps impressing in its beautiful, simple brilliance. In his (relatively) famous 1969 Playboy interview, he said, “Man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in.” When technology becomes invisible, so do its effects. Predicting what those effects will be, or even noticing them while they are happening, is basically impossible. Correlations look (and often are) spurious at best. Futurism is a mug’s game. Something is new and scary and amazing, and then all at once it is ubiquitous and ignored. The moment we take a technology for granted is the same moment it goes to work shaping us.

Consider cars. We made cars and then we turned into people who have cars. We changed manufacturing, jobs, and unions because of cars. We carved roads into the landscape and built cities out of pavement. We put garages on houses and red lines on maps. Teenagers got pregnant and Kerouac took a road trip. We created an entire global economy that relies on sucking stuff out of the ground and lighting it on fire while the stink chokes the planet. For a while we “asked for directions,” and then we just put the directions on our phones. Think of the effort required to get real-time directions: A thing in space knows where you are and tells a thing in your pocket to stick a blue dot on a map you can control with your finger. That exists because we are car people, though it’s not something Carl Benz or Henry Ford had in mind.

We made television, but it’s never been just a box in the corner of living rooms. TV changed the way we’re entertained and informed. It changed the way we think and understand. TV gave us TV trays and TV dinners. It gave us six o’clock news, 24-hour news, “infotainment” and “Nintendo warfare”—the sterilization of images from war zones used in popular consumption, so it’s all brave soldiers with guns and no dead bodies or blood. It gave us Jennifer Aniston’s haircut and, somehow, Donald Trump. Now we have bingeing and “TV everywhere” and instant access to what is effectively an infinite amount of video, including movies and shows, vlogs, sports, kids playing video games, live streams, reviews, news, fake news, straight porn, gay porn, fetish porn, amateur porn, and so on. It is just assumed you can take your phone out and watch TV until your eyes dry up and fall out of your head. There is no way that doesn’t do something profound to us— to our society and culture—at a very fundamental level.

How could it not?

***

The smartphone is a perfect little package of personal distraction and cultural disruption. We look at our phones more than we look at each other. We text and tweet and snap more than we talk. We like and fave and heart more than we love. The phone permeates our lives—first it was our work lives, then our home lives, then our sex lives— reducing the complexity of being human to a few simple gestures.

Okay, I’m being hyperbolic. But not by much. The phone has become a synecdoche for all the ills of the modern world. In September, The Atlantic ran a story by psychologist Jean Twenge asking: “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” She argues that the one-two punch of phones and social media has left today’s kids miserable and generally unprepared for the world. It was as convincing as it was horrifying. Even beyond the stats and research, it feels accurate. Anecdotally, my two-year-old is a ninja with an iPhone, firing up Peppa Pig faster than you can say, “What the hell is a Peppa Pig?” My five-year-old would swipe a million Poké Balls at a million Pokémon if given the opportunity. My teenager will tap his way through oblivion if not prompted to come up for air. I don’t think of my kids as being miserable (or at least not any more miserable than I was), but I also remember how my parents never seemed in tune with my feelings when I was young (and I definitely watched too much TV).

It’s easy to point out possible solutions to what we mostly see as bad habits. Limit access to screens. Set timers. Keep your phone in your pocket. Take the kids outside and do something—anything—with them. At the very least, it won’t hurt them to get a little more fresh air while fresh air is a thing that still exists. But it is also beside the point. You can take your kids camping every weekend and they’ll still eventually be on Facebook. They’ll still swipe right to date, post selfies, share memes, play Candy Crush. You can do everything to make sure they grow up knowing there’s more to life than a black slab made of glass and magic, but someday they’ll own one just like everybody else. The butterfly has flapped its wings and we’re just waiting to see the effect.

***

In 2001 I met my wife at a student journalism conference while we were living on opposite sides of the country. We spent two-and-a-half years like that, which wasn’t ideal, but it also wasn’t as tough as people assume because we talked to each other a lot. Käthe and I are both very verbal, so I’m not sure our relationship would have worked any earlier in history. To ultimately end up together we needed everything that led to Alexander Graham Bell’s original telephone patent, decades of infrastructure development stretching wires from coast to coast, and cordless phones to talk for hours away from our respective roommates. And we needed capitalism—a complicated beast of a thing—to force somebody, somewhere (probably in marketing, certainly a hero) to come up with the brilliant concept of “unlimited evenings and weekends.”

The shape of society owes a lot to the phone. Like the smartphone, the old-school telephone had effects on work and home (and, yes, sex). It made the world smaller and faster. In Understanding Media McLuhan wrote, “The child and the teenager understand the telephone, embracing the cord and the ear-mike as if they were beloved pets.” (He then spends several paragraphs on prostitution and phones.) I’m sure he wasn’t specifically referring to two 21-year-olds meeting at a conference and deciding Nova Scotia and British Columbia weren’t so far apart, just as I’m sure none of the people involved in inventing the phone considered how it might impact our young romance.

So how do you prepare for a future when you don’t know what it is you don’t know? How do you create a car in 1885 or 1908 or 1950 or pretty much any time before 1990—before climate change was a thing we talked about? How do you invent television before Netflix? How do you create the phone before Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and the millions of other things we use our phones for that have nothing to do with phoning people? How do you design PowerPoint so it doesn’t blow up a spaceship?

I suppose you design them exactly the way we did. We make them sort of knowing what they’ll do for us, but never fully comprehending what they’ll do to us.

In writing of McLuhan, Culkin suggested in his Saturday Review article that the results didn’t have to be inevitable “as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

But usually it just feels like we’re fish oblivious to the water.

Todd McLellan’s Things Come Apart series features disassembled technology, both old and new, to explore our relationships with their disposable nature. As technology improves and we replace our gadgets at a rapid pace, what comes of the components that make it work? McLellan shoots each disassembled machine by dropping it from a platform, creating a stunning view of technology, inside out.

The next time you look at social media, I want you pay attention to a subtle detail on each post: the timestamp. If you’re on Twitter, for example, when was each post published? When I was writing this paragraph, I glanced down at my Twitter feed, and here’s what I saw: A tweet about a Chinese internet CEO acting nuts (53 seconds ago), a snapshot of a friend’s cat asleep in an inbox tray (one minute ago), a hot take on Hillary Clinton’s book (two minutes ago). And on and on, backwards into time, minute by minute.

This is what’s known as “reverse chronological” design, and it’s the organizing principle for nearly every social media giant. Log into Instagram, Facebook, a discussion board on Reddit, and just about any blog, and boom—it’s all reverse chron. They’re constantly refreshing the feed, pushing the newest, latest updates to you. History recedes in a flash. What happened last minute is immediately pushed away, as is last hour, and the last day. It makes it awfully hard to examine the past, even the quite recent past. If I wanted to see what my feed looked like, say, last week? I’d be sitting there scrolling backward until my forefinger fell off. Twitter doesn’t want me doing that.

These days, we’re warned about the myriad of ways that social media corrodes our culture. We worry about how it creates “filter bubbles” and fosters a rotting swamp of abusive trolls. We’re told it’s sapping our penchant for face-to-face human contact: “We have sacrificed conversation for mere connection,” as MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes. And hey, how about those gormless millennials? Their selfie snapping and relentless hustling for likes has become “a conduit for individual narcissism,” if you believe psychologist Jean Twenge, co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic.

Me, I’m not so sure. I’ve been writing about technology and its effects for two decades, and my sense is that many of these fears are overblown. Toxic trolldom is real, certainly; but fears that technology will turn us into numb, self-obsessed morons are as old as the hills. They’re likely driven more by intergenerational friction, the habitual scorn of the olds for the youngs.

If you asked me what the true danger about social media is, I’d say it’s much more subtle. It’s the problem of time—and becoming stuck in the present. It’s the relentless pressure of reverse chron.

And, weirdly enough, it’s a danger that pioneering Canadian communications theorist Harold Innis warned us about—over 60 years ago.

***

When we talk about Canadians famous for analyzing new media, we often think of Marshall McLuhan first. With his koan “the medium is the message,” McLuhan synthesized his basic idea: Our tools, from electric light to television to phones, change not just how we communicate, but what we communicate about.

But if you asked McLuhan, he would tell you that Innis got there first. In the 1920s and ’30s, Innis cut his teeth as an economist studying how Canada’s abundant resources—furs, wood, fish—shaped the country’s economy. Later on, he became one of Canada’s first red-hot cultural nationalists, inveighing against the way American art and military power warped Canada’s own industries.

Late in his career, though, Innis suddenly pivoted, becoming mesmerized by how media changed the timbre of our cognition. In The Bias of Communication, published in 1951, he went as far back as early Mesopotamians to analyze how their medium, clay tablets, affected the power of elites. Clay, Innis noted, was durable—it’ll last for aeons—but heavy and hard to move. As a result, any religious edicts written down in cuneiform would hang around for a long time, but wouldn’t reach very far, geographically. You can’t easily lug a thousand pounds of religious texts for a hundred miles. So power endured over a long time period, but each empire had a small radius.

The shift to paper, beginning with papyrus in Roman culture, inverted this proposition. Now, Innis noted, written-down rules and edicts and religious tracts were lightweight, so they could be carried for thousands of miles by horse. This is part of why the Roman Empire spread all the way up to Britain, and why—in the 15th century, when Gutenberg created the printing press—Martin Luther’s rebellious theses spread across Europe in a matter of months. Paper accelerated the spread of ideas. It was great for memes.

But paper also, Innis pointed out, made ideas transient. That’s because, compared to clay tablets, paper isn’t very durable. It fades, it gets ripped; the Library of Alexandria burns. Perhaps worse, from Innis’s point of view, is paper encouraged disposability. Once newspaper printing presses started cranking in 17th century—pushed into overdrive by steam power in the 19th—society was flooded with the weird new form of “daily news,” something you discarded immediately after reading.

Many regard early newspapers as cradles of modern democracy and human rights, and there’s obvious truth to that. But Innis worried that newspapers had a structural bias: They focused culture relentlessly on the present. To make money, newspapers had to train us to come back every day—to become convinced that if we stopped keeping up, stopped checking the papers, we’d miss something important, or mesmerizing, or, more likely, deliciously lascivious. (That’s partly why newspapers quickly discovered the allure of covering long-running trials: “It is doubtful whether anything really unifies the country like its murders,” as Innis quotes one 19th-century wit.)

Modern media was changing our relationship to time. It gave us “an obsession with the immediate… a criticism of the moment at the moment,” Innis argued, quoting Henry James. News media’s message, in the McLuhan-esque sense, was to stop paying attention to the past; hell, to stop paying attention to last week, or even yesterday. It was a format that “inevitably shrinks time down to the present, to a one-day world of the immediate and the transitory.” It made us creatures of “present-mindedness.”

A culture that is stuck in the present is one that can’t solve big problems. If you want to plan for the future, if you want to handle big social and political challenges, you have to decouple yourself from day-to-day crises, to look back at history, to learn from it, to see trendlines. You have to be usefully detached from the moment.

What Innis feared—as his biographer Alexander John Watson puts it—is that “our culture was becoming so saturated with new instantaneous media that there was no longer a hinterland to which refugee intellectuals could retreat to develop a new paradigm that would allow us to tackle the new problems we are facing.”

***

Which brings us back to today’s social media and its omnipresent reverse-chron design.

What in god’s name would Innis have thought of Twitter? He died in 1952, so on a sheerly technological level, smartphones and the internet would have seemed like distant, unfamiliar sci-fi. But if you showed him the way social media is organized? He’d probably wince in recognition. Reverse chron is present-mindedness jacked into hypermetabolic overload. Hey, someone said something 15 seconds ago! Now someone’s saying something else! Drop what you’re doing and check it out!

If you ask me, Innis nailed it. Present-mindedness is our biggest danger. Forget all the handwringing about our social habits; I doubt technology is turning us into much bigger narcissists than we already were. And politically, tech has had many wonderful effects—particularly when long-ignored voices have learned how to connect and persuade online. Black Lives Matter and the “We are the 99 percent” economic message of Occupy Wall Street, for instance, both blossomed via social media.

But reverse chron? That’s well and truly a mental trap. Social-media firms know this: They’re experts at hijacking our attention, sucking us into the day-to-day drama of whatever’s blowing up online right now. They use reverse chron because it’s so addictive.

It’s up to us to heed Innis’s warning, and fight back. On one level it’s a personal battle, seizing back control of our own attention: We have to learn to enjoy what’s powerful and delightful about online tools, but to resist their casino-like seductions into the here and now. Some of society’s biggest problems, such as global warming, require careful long-term planning; we can’t tackle them if we’re being dragged in 20 directions every hour by shiny objects and oven-fresh hot takes.

We could use better tools, too. Since their very design affects how we use them, how about forms of social media that don’t focus so narrowly on what’s happening right this instant?

Facebook and Twitter have recently tried to gently tinker with such experiments, occasionally highlighting posts from a few hours or days ago. But I’d love to see more designs that are even more radical yet.

How about this: When I post about a subject, have the social network show me powerful, useful related posts and threads from weeks, months, or even years gone by. Or remind me of thoughts or ideas I myself posted on the subject from years past; connect me with the history and trajectory of my own cognition. Or let’s be even more radical: Why not crawl through Google Books’ public domain archive and find me related work published on the subject in the 1900s? Imagine a social network with content that spans centuries!

This sounds a bit nuts, I realize, and utopian; I’ve no idea how you’d convince social-media barons to rejig their wildly profitable mechanics of reverse chron. But I suspect many people already have an appetite for posts, news, and material that drags them out of the present. Behold, for example, the weird success of @HistoryInPics, an account with more than four million followers that does nothing but tweet pictures of historical photos. (Even better, it was started by two teenagers; they’re now young twentysomethings.)

There’s no simple answer here. But it’s worth thinking about this subtle trap that social media has created. History is long, and worth learning from. It’s time we grappled with the problem of time itself.

Kay Kritzwiser, a feature writer assigned to the Globe and Mail’s weekend supplement, The Globe Magazine, had never heard of Marshall McLuhan when, on a mid-November morning in 1963, her edior, Colin McCullough, asked her to write a profile of him. She visited the Globe’s library and took away a Who’s Who entry and a few articles about the University of Toronto English professor. One, a profile by Kildare Dobbs published the previous year, compared a conversation with McLuhan to a trip to outer space. “In orbit with him one looks down to see the comfortable world of familiar facts diminished to the scale of molecules; long vistas of history yawn frighteningly…”

Kritzwiser, who regarded herself as a woman with her feet on the ground, thought it sounded like a carnival ride. She read on: McLuhan’s first book, an eccentric intellectual critique of advertising and society called The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, had been published in 1951 to good reviews and weak sales. His second major book, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, had been published in the fall of 1962 and widely reviewed both in Canada and in prestigious international publications, and had won that year’s Governor General’s Award for non-fiction. Nevertheless, McLuhan was, for the most part, a high-brow academic whose challenging ideas on communications and media were confined mainly to university campuses and a few industry and government organizations. In the fall of 1964, he was two years away from the mega-celebrityhood that his theories in part addressed.

At that time, almost all female reporters were forced into one of two stereotypes: those who specialized in women’s page fare (weddings, fashion, cooking tips) and the so-called “sob sisters”—reporters whose great journalistic achievement was the use of sympathy to coax family photos from grieving widows. Kritzweiser fit into a third category that might be classified as post-emancipation and pre-feminism: independent, determined career women actively competing with their male counterparts (at half their salaries) who nonetheless saw no irony in backing up serious reporting and research skills with a feminine flair. They were the precursors of the liberated, college-educated go-getters who began pouring into newsrooms in the mid-1960s.

A Regina native, Kritzwiser was recruited by the Globe in 1956. A year later, she had established herself as one of the paper’s senior feature writers. In his 1999 memoir, Hurly Burly: A Time at the Globe, Richard J. Doyle fondly described Kritzwiser in a passage that also revealed an attitude toward women shared by many of his generation:

The lady knows how to bat an eyelash, swivel a hip, show off an ankle or arch an eyebrow. A rustle of silk announces her arrival, a breathless voice begins the interview, a laugh like [Lauren] Bacall’s punctuates the questions. Tiny gasps greet the most mundane of responses to her guileless prodding into the dark recesses of the hapless fellow on the other side of her notepad.

Until the interview appears in print. “Did I say that? I didn’t admit… but if I did… why did I tell her about… Who does she think she is?”

Kritzwiser’s writing reflected Doyle’s modernizing of the Globe in the 1960s. Although most of us take it for granted today, at this time people were just beginning to realize that objectivity, a goal of news reporting for decades, was seen as too confining to cope with the complexities of modern life. Features were longer than a conventional news story and had a beginning, middle, and an end; readers who devoted time and attention to them expected some interpretation, not just a recitation of facts. Pierre Berton and a handful of others had turned out these kinds of features from time to time since the 1940s, but now they were becoming accepted practice. And it was the only approach that had a hope of making sense out of a figure like Marshall McLuhan.

“How do you do, Professor McLuhan?” Kritzwiser said, stepping into McLuhan’s cramped, shabby office on the U of T campus. Considering McLuhan’s published statements about how the electronic media were killing print, it was hard not to notice the books: shelves groaned with them, they were piled high on tables and the floor, and they spilled out into his secretary’s tiny alcove.

“How do you do,” said McLuhan, standing up behind his desk and indicating a chair. Kritzwiser sat down, crossed her legs, and placed a notebook on her knee.

Like most things she did when working, Kritzwiser dressed for effect; this morning she was wearing her beautifully tailored grey wool suit with the pearl-white buttons and a stylish grey felt hat. She was a short, trim woman with a sunny personality and plain, boyish features. On most occasions she seemed entirely at ease, a function, in part, of several years spent in amateur theatre in Regina, which she regarded as excellent preparation for interviewing. She drew a cigarette from its package and politely asked McLuhan whether he had a light.

He was a tall, lanky man, his thinning grey hair swept straight back, handsome in a distinguished way, she observed. He wore a russet-coloured Harris tweed suit and, as he leaned forward in a courtly gesture to light her cigarette, she noticed his relaxed stance, the angular lines of his free hand on his hip, index finger pointing downward. Then he sat down and lit a thin cigarillo.

Kritzwiser was a social smoker. Cigarettes, to her, were mainly aesthetic, a prop, part of a formality that relaxed both interviewer and interviewee in the days before antismoking sentiments came to dominate Canadian society. Her brand was Sweet Caporals, not for the taste but for the red filter that approximately matched her lipstick.

McLuhan, she knew, had been born in Edmonton and brought up in Winnipeg, so they chatted about the West. McLuhan had no idea how to make small talk—he described it as “a world without a foreground, but with the whole world as a background.” Then he began a discourse about how the industrial revolution was symbolized by the extension of feet into the wheel, the knight-in-armour into a tank. Next the earth’s curvature was discovered, which led to the invention of modern media.

“Today, the central nervous system has been extended outside the body through the age of electricity,” he explained, smoke forming a nimbus around his head. “Literally, our brain is now outside our skull. We’re lashed around by the fury of these extensions. It’s like a spinning buzz-saw. It’s not known where the teeth are but we know they’re there.”

It didn’t take much to get McLuhan started, and he was warmed up now, his voice purring on eight well-tuned cylinders while his thoughts wound circuitously through a maze of theories, many related to a work-in-progress that would be published, a few months later, as Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Kritzwiser’s pen darted back and forth across the page in an effort to keep up. McLuhan was incredible; he spoke in what sounded like feature-story paragraphs, although following his train of thought was like trying to scoop up a puddle of mercury. It was, she thought, as though he simply hadn’t stitched together all the loose ends yet, as though he was feeling his way toward a new philosophy, like a blind man acquainting himself with a new neighbourhood.

An exhilarated Kritzwiser arrived back at the office. In today’s world, where computers are not just in most homes but now ubiquitous in the palms of millions, it’s hard to remember that 50 years ago McLuhan’s ideas—about a “global village” and a computer-driven medium of communication that sounded a lot like the internet—might as well have been science fiction. “I don’t know what I’ve got,” she told her editor, “but I do know a man has pulled aside a curtain for me. I don’t know what I saw but I know I glimpsed the future.”

Later she read over her notes. The story hadn’t gelled yet, she thought. She was still looking for what she called the “moment of truth,” that dramatic scene or anecdote or object that symbolically captures the essential theme of a story. But what was the theme? So far, Kritzwiser had a professor in a book-filled office and seven pages of notes that included references to Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, as well as cryptic phrases (even though they were in her own handwriting) such as “in a non-specialist society, relevance will be our business.”

The following Saturday, she arrived at McLuhan’s rambling two-storey home in the Annex district of Toronto, a few blocks north of the U of T campus. There were bicycles on the front porch and inside the homey smell of a baking pie filled the air. McLuhan, in a rumpled flannel shirt and casual slacks, looked like a homebody sitting in his chair beside a crackling fire with his legs stretched out. He was talking to a friend who worked at the Royal Ontario Museum about a lecture he was scheduled to give the following week.

“TV is tactile,” McLuhan was saying, rubbing his fingers together as though he were feeling silk. “The eye has immunity to radio…”

But Kritzwiser’s attention was captured by a carved wooden slab of a mask hanging on the wall. Was it Greek? She was interested in Greek and Roman mythology and her instincts told her she had found the symbol for her story. On January 4, 1964, her article, bearing the title “The McLuhan Galaxy,” was published.

On the fireplace wall of the Herbert Marshall McLuhan home, a giant wooden mask broods over the living room. Visiting children swarm up the chair beneath it to stroke its satiny furrows. It is a mask of Tiresias, the Theban of Greek legend who saw Athena bathing and was struck with blindness when she splashed water in his face. Through she repented, Athena was unable to restore his sight. Instead, she gave Tiresias the power of soothsaying. She opened his ears so that he could understand the language of the birds. She gave him a staff with which he walked as safely as a sighted person.

Six foot tall and lean, Marshall McLuhan, an internationally known expert in the new science of communications, casts a shadow like a television tower on the University of Toronto campus… But in his home, sprawled beside the fire, the mask of Tiresias above him makes a provocative comparison. For McLuhan’s new global reputation as a communications authority credits him with the power to see as few do, to hear a new language and to walk confidently in the strange and frightening world of the electronic age.

It was not Kritzwiser’s best story. McLuhan was both charming and hard to pin down, and her profile was overly flattering. Some of McLuhan’s ideas were summarized but they weren’t critically analyzed, nor was Kritzwiser particularly well qualified to do so. Few reporters were at the time, but she might have included one or two of the critics of McLuhan who thought he was a self-absorbed crackpot whose theories lacked intellectual rigor, or more often simply lacked a point. The closest Kritzwiser came to representing that view was through an unnamed faculty member who said he admired McLuhan’s ability to challenge tradition but admitted he left his seminars “with a thundering headache.”

Her story was otherwise typical of how daily journalism usually dealt with McLuhan in the mid-1960s. The opening was revealing. The key phrase was the reference to McLuhan’s ability “to hear a new language and to walk confidently in the strange and frightening world of the electronic age.” Aside from tying neatly into the Tiresias myth, it reflected the accepted wisdom among mainstream journalists that the electronic age was to be feared and mistrusted. Since the public had as much trouble understanding abstract subjects involving science, physics, and technology as the press had writing about them, most stories focused on a person. The mid-1960s was a time of accelerated change, and McLuhan seemed to offer an accessible link with the future. A Canadian, he was emerging as an internationally acknowledged “expert”— which lent him credibility—but he was also easily portrayed as a literary invention: an ivory-tower egghead who might be a genius, an adventurous non-conformist who, against all odds, wasn’t a young, bearded, wild-eyed revolutionary. Instead, he was a respectable family man with six children, and it was as easy as it was natural for Kritzwiser to “humanize” him near the top of her story by presenting him in a Norman Rockwell–like setting where Corrine McLuhan, “wife and mother, calm, handsome and dark-haired,” appeared as “the pivotal force in the McLuhan galaxy.”

Sometimes the mainstream media seemed like a three-ring circus, with a few big attractions on the front page (or leading the TV newscast) and plenty of sideshows to ensure there was something of interest for everyone. Even papers like the Globe or the New York Times, with their well-educated readers and lofty reputations, still had to entertain as well as inform. A few months later, when McLuhan’s Understanding Media was published, The Globe Magazine ran a critical review by Lister Sinclair in which he declared, “He has become a writer and he can’t write. He has become an authority on communications and he can’t communicate.” Many academics agreed, and if the debate had been confined to the insular world of university scholarship, today McLuhan might be an obscure curio of the ’60s. But instead, he became even more popular and controversial; a “McLuhan story” had increased in value because it was viewed as entertaining, which resulted in more coverage.

By publishing Kritzwiser’s respectful profile, the Globe introduced McLuhan to an elite audience and acted as a stamp of approval, signalling to timid editors of other papers that McLuhan was important. Over the next few years, the momentum grew. Articles were written about him in virtually every major North American publication, including the New York Times, Playboy, Time, Life, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Saturday Night, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and the New York Herald Tribune. (Which, in November 1965 in its weekend magazine, New York, published Tom Wolfe’s legendary profile of McLuhan that posed the Wolfian question: “Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov, studs of the intelligentsia game—suppose he is the oracle of the modern times—what if he is right…?”)

As McLuhan had written, the medium is the message. That meant new technologies, from television to computers, were revolutionizing human consciousness and altering the context of communications, but it could also be summarized as content follows form. The properties of the medium were more important than the information it conveyed. Still, even many scholars had trouble following his train of thought, so, in 1964, the job of communicating McLuhan and his ideas fell to journalists like Kay Kritzwiser who focused on the most accessible information—and left the theories to the future in which we live.

Lots more great things to read this issue, including Will Braun‘s cover story on the coming boom in new hydroelectric projects in Canada. Hydro providers will invest billions in new dams in the coming decade, but energy experts, environmentalists, and aboriginal groups are skeptical of hydro’s green reputation—especially since much of this new electricity infrastructure is being built to satisfy the insatiable appetite of the U.S. power grid. On Marshall McLuhan’s 100th birthday, David Hayes offers a short history of the iconic media theorist’s rise, beginning with a curious Globe and Mail reporter’s 1963 profile. And we mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan with a special roundtable discussion between Amir Attaran, John Duncan, and Graeme Smith.

Plenty more, of course: Katie Hyslop introduces us to Dechinta Bush University, the culmination of the 50-year dream of a university by and for the North; Katherine Laidlaw talks to the activists who are trying to cut sky-high smoking rates in Nunavut with a new public awareness campaign; Jason Tushinski investigates the “Suspicious Incident Reporting System,” a snitch line for CSIS and the RCMP that has privacy and civil rights experts concerned; Kaitlin Fontana spends eight hours watching Sun News Network so you don’t have to; Daniel Wilson argues for the abolition of the Indian Act; and Jackie Wong profiles photographer Roberta Holden, whose impressionistic images of the arctic capture the changing moods of the landscape.

Plus: Paul McLaughlin interviews Canada’s Nieman Journalism Fellow, David Skok; Teresa Goff on the constitutional right to a healthy environment; Joe Rayment on the rebirth of the company town; Lauren McKeon on Canada’s nudity laws throughout history; Graham F. Scott on the Tories’ tough-on-crime stance; Brigitte Noël on non-hormonal birth control; Heather Stilwell sends a postcard from newly independent Southern Sudan; Stephen Sharpe on origami and papercraft artist Drew Nelson; Navneet Alang on Big Brother in the age of the smartphone; Christina Palassio on Book Madam & Associates; and reviews of Kristyn Dunnion‘s The Dirt Chronicles, Hal Niedzviecki‘s Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened, Sam Cheuk‘s Love Figures, and Rebecca Rosenblum‘s The Big Dream.

With new fiction by Pasha Malla, and new poetry by Elena E. Johnson and Carolyn Smart.