McLuhan

From the WSJ review of Douglas Coupland's Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work (2010) -

Like his fellow devout Catholic, J.R.R. Tolkien, media theorist Marshall McLuhan exerts a powerful fascination over certain adolescent minds. His catchphrase, "the medium is the message," encapsulates an intoxicating technological determinism; his prediction, in the 1960s, that electronic communication would create a "global village" makes him seem a seer. Novelist Douglas Coupland, himself a chronicler of technology and culture, seems never to have outgrown his McLuhan phase.

Inspired by perceived similarities between their lives—both are Canadians, from stern, Protestant, frontier stock—Mr. Coupland has written a short yet infuriatingly digressive biography of McLuhan. In broad outlines, he shows how a scholar of Renaissance literature turned his critical skills toward such topics as popular culture and television. Readers may be surprised to learn that McLuhan believed the effects of modern communication technology on society to be mostly malign. Old-fashioned to the point of medievalism, he predicted the end of print but was not at all pleased about the possibility.

... Coupland's biography exhibits the same flaws as McLuhan's own books. It is lazily researched: Describing major figures that a young graduate student might have encountered at Cambridge University in the 1930s, Mr. Coupland admits that "much of this information came from Wikipedia."