For those who have read any of Marshall McLuhan’s book or have heard of him, hard-to-read is an inevitable feature of his text; and it is not because of being pretentious, rather the opposite, for that the text is understandable but the structure is confusing. As Mark Federman puts it in On Reading McLuhan:
Read more“McLuhan’s work is mosaic. It cannot be understood as a linear construction, beginning at the beginning and proceeding through the middle to the end. He presents no linear argument, no consistently built case of evidence, yet his body of work is remarkably consistent, except when it’s not. His evidence is clearly presented, except when it’s obscure. His arguments and examples are easily caught, mainly because they are reiterated throughout all his works — if you miss it the first, second, third or seventh times through, you’re sure to catch it the tenth or fifteenth or twentieth time you see it. Reading McLuhan is an exercise in pattern recognition, and once you see the patterns that emerge from the McLuhan mosaic, you will never, ever, be able not to see them — anywhere and everywhere.” [1]