McLuhan began his study of media with work on advertising that culminated in his book The Mechanical Bride. The first book I read by McLuhan was Understanding Media that was published in 1964. He was an academic who refused to act like one. He was criticized for his use of media to get his message out, an undeserved criticism. He felt strongly about the necessity for everyone to 'wake up' and become aware of the invisible effects of media, not the message, on our culture. He was not a critic or an advocate of the changes he was describing. He was like an artist trying to show others what he saw. He was a poet and philosopher, not a scientist. He was similar to Lucretius who wrote an epic poem describing his philosophy of the world. His writing is dense, with references to a vast amount of knowledge not possessed by the ordinary reader and filled with poetics, making his work difficult to understand. "By the mid-1970s, a number of books appeared attacking McLuhan's work, branding him too conservative, too Catholic, too flippant and, above all, arguing that he was a technological determinist. Emboldened by the intellectuals, newspaper reviewers trashed his latest books. Undaunted, McLuhan begins his work on the Laws of Media, his grand unified theory...But, by the time he formulated the Laws, McLuhan had lost his audience. Journalist were baffled by him and most academics were dismissive. " Remember as you read this, McLuhan was a poet. For example, even if his explanation of the physiology of TV is incorrect, his understanding of the effects of TV is profound. I found his observations about the culture we are in now to be shockingly profound. So, I put myself in the category of Tom Wolfe when he wrote, "What if he's right? "