When Marshall Mc Luhan first coined the phrases global village & the medium is the message in 1964 no-one could have predicted today's information-dependent planet No-one that is except for a handful of science fiction writers & Marshall Mc Luhan Understanding Media was written twenty years before the PC revolution & thirty years before the rise of the Internet Yet Mc Luhan's insights into our engagement with a variety of media led to a complete rethinking of our entire society He believed that the message of electronic media foretold the end of humanity as it was known In 1964 this looked like the paranoid babblings of a madman In our twenty-first century digital world the madman looks quite sane Understanding Media the most important book ever written on communication Ignore its message at your peril