Thursday is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the literary scholar, media theorist and intellectual icon Marshall McLuhan.

In his books The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967), War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) and From Cliché to Archetype (1970), McLuhan analyzed the effect of a wide range of media on individual psychology and common culture.

This essay examines McLuhan’s legacy by reading one o...