McLuhan barely disguises his dislike for the Gutenberg (Protestant) era. When contrasting the literate world of the book age with the preliterate medieval world, he harks back romantically to the corporate society of the middle ages when anomie was unknown and an organic society cared for all its children. Individualism and the curse of Protestantism destroyed the foundations of the corporate system, cutting the members loose from the protection they had enjoyed.

But if McLuhan is a romantic, he ought to be an optimistic one, since he predicts that the electronic media will recreate the closed society. For centuries men grew more and more isolated, and the comfortable village, where privacy did not exist, seemed increasingly remote. When the villager learned to write he became an individual. He began to develop a private point of view. The world seemed to explode as the village learned of strange and unreachable people and places outside own circle.

In the age of instantaneous communication, the world is becoming smaller as jets become faster. Telstar and Early Bird make it possible for Americans and Japanese and Russians, without even leaving their homes, to watch a soccer game in London while it is being played. Moving information at the speed of light has reversed the trend toward expansion of the world, and McLuhan suggests that the world will continue to shrink until we all live in a village again, a single, global village.

But if a shrinking world and the revival of the Catholic ethic are desirable goals for McLuhan, he is apparently not at all sure that they can be achieved quickly and without pain. The danger arises from mankind's obsession with the past. We look at life through a rear view mirror, McLuhan says, and we are unprepared for the roadblocks ahead. The real hero of Understanding Media and The Medium is the Message is James Joyce.

McLUHAN believes that Joyce, because he was an artist, understood the importance of media, and he regards Finnegans Wake as a textbook for the electronic age.

The method by which Joyce presents his data is nearly as significant as the data itself, for the method is the electronic joke, and Joyce uses is masterfully. In The Medium is the Massage McLuhan explains that "older societies thrived on purely literary plots. They demanded story lines. Today's humor, on the contrary, has no story line-no sequence. It is usually a compressed overlay of stories." The electronic joke, in other words, is the pun. The humor arises from the superimposition of different ideas. The book-age man, listening with eyes that can only focus on one idea at a time, is indifferent to the pun. McLuhan spends a good deal of time explaining Joyce's word-plays, but he also contributes a number of his own: "all the world's a sage," "movies: the reel world," and "the medium is the massage," for example.

McLuhan has a sense of humor that is somewhat zany and heavy-handed, and he has a prose style to match.Understanding Media violates many of the traditions of linear prose, and it need not be read from beginning to end. McLuhan makes every page stand on its own and the pages can be read in almost random order. But to accomplish this he is forced to repeat again and again his basic principles. The aphorisms, particularly "the medium is the message," are recited with such frequency that they become completely unchallengeable. The material presented, however, is sufficiently interesting that this repetitiveness does not become unbearable, and the continual restatement of the principles makes them lucid and unforgettable.

After Understanding Media, with its overpowering documentation and illustrations, The Medium is the Massage appears to be some sort of joke. Everything from the trick of its title to the contrived pictorial gags and New Yorker cartoons suggests that McLuhan is pulling someone's leg. And that is probably his intention.

McLuhan believes that learning has traditionally been a glum affair, aimed at "serious" students. The most effective weapon for attacking the contemporary environment, he says, is humor. The humor he uses is often outlandish, but this is hardly surprising when one considers that the humorist is a romantic-revolutionary-reactionary who believes that the "science-fiction" technology of the present and future will enable us to recreate a beautiful and protective past.