McLuhan coined the expression “the medium is the message” and the term global village, and predicted the World wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years after his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. With the arrival of the internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspective.

The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, published in 1967, was McLuhan’s best seller,^[13] “eventually selling nearly a million copies worldwide.”^[71] Initiated by Quentin Fiore,^[72] McLuhan adopted the term “massage” to denote the effect each medium has on the human sensorium, taking inventory of the “effects” of numerous media in terms of how they “massage” the sensorium.^[j]