As a Canadian educator in mass communications he probed many concepts about media and society stimulated by his observations of American advertising. He was a professor of English literature, who all of a sudden at the age of 40 started writing a series of profoundly modern books about media, technology, and communications. He died on the last day of 1980 succumbing to a cerebral stroke which plagued the last year of his life. In an interview Short 1966 Interview. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.
All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms.
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. The world is a global village. The effect comes before the cause.