On September 30, 2025, the McLuhan Salon in Toronto, led by Paolo Granata, organized a presentation of Wisdom Weavers: The Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, featuring the author Tom Cooper and the publisher Paul Levinson (Connected Editions). In his talk, Tom Cooper was also tasked with extracting and constructing what Innis and McLuhan might answer today to the challenges of digital media. Here are some key points from his talk (cut and edited with his permission – A.M.).
Guest post: Tom Cooper
Some of the most popular current workshops worldwide are about relationships – how to fix troubled or broken relationships, how to find your soulmate, etc. And yet, what about our media relationships? That would be the most important workshop because we North Americans spend more time with our screens than with people. So what type of screens should we date? How often and for how long? Are each of these social and anti-social media our tools, or our mates – or our masters?
Can Innis or McLuhan assist us with a deeper understanding of who we are beneath our programming and improve the world we live in? I am not here to confirm sainthood upon either one. But they were powerful lighthouses who revealed the dangerous shoals and shallows in an ocean of increasing media saturation.
And that I think is what we might call a central core teaching of what we later came to label “the Toronto School” of thinking. The central principle is that communication and its related technology are core components of social change, sensory ratios, institutional and personal relations, and the sculpting of history. Over time many other scholars – such as Ted Carpenter, Northrop Frye, Ursula Franklin, Eric Havelock, Eric McLuhan, and you’ll note that Professor Granata lists others on his excellent Toronto School website – played a part in this, including voicing their insights in the magazine-cum-journal called Explorations, edited by McLuhan and Carpenter.
So, what eternal and topical wisdom might we consider from them? What are the implications of their work for our thought and lives?
#1. PAY ATTENTION. Inspect all social stimuli we take for granted. If I turned on a receiver in this room, I could pick up literally thousands of cell calls, zooms, radio broadcasts, podcasts, social media, AI, and far more of which we are totally unaware. Become aware. Pay attention.
#2. EDUCATE. Both men and most of the Toronto school believed students and indeed everyone should learn precursor approaches to what we now call “media literacy”. Children must understand how digital devices, advertising, AI, and far more – can control and addict them. The message most frequently given to young people by media of all kinds today is “there is something wrong with you – buy something!”
#3. We need chronic PRESEARCH, a word I have coined to mean research prior to the implementation of new technologies. We research the likely effects of food and drugs before placing them on the market. But we conduct little research about how each new medium might unintentionally change or harm society. We discovered that pregnant women should not sit at length in front of desktop computers after the implementation of such desktops in the workspace. We rated and labeled violent video games after we studied correlations between violent behavior and violent content. So, presearch is necessary.
#4. EXAMINE THE INTERPLAY OF INFLUENCES. In the 2020’s, we must recognize what professor Kathleen Jamieson called “the interplay of influences” – and what Professor Neil Postman and others dubbed media ecology. McLuhan pointed us toward the famous Canadian biochemist, Ross Hume Hall, who found that when food was tested, scientists were examining just one additive at a time which might not be harmful. But the combination of specific additives and preservatives to a food might be toxic. Similarly, it is no longer sufficient to ask about the impact of a single medium like a cell phone held next to my head. We must now ask what happens to my head when that device carries thousands of videos, recordings, Apps, platforms, and AI – what might be called a media cocktail.
So, we are no longer driving under the influence of one medium – although we note how many driving accidents are linked to cell use – but in life itself we are driving under the influence of eternal mixtures which fuse satellite, subsea, AI, print, wireless, wired, fiber, and more… chronically. We should examine how in combination they will alter, in McLuhan’s terms, our sensory balance and, in Innis’s terms, the stability or instability of our society.
People often ask, “If Innis and McLuhan were alive, what would they say about the new super-technology and AI”. Let me read one answer from our featured book, Wisdom Weavers:
In this brave new micro-to-macro world in which intelligent agents (i.e., micro ‘bots) choreograph our online searches, you can almost hear McLuhan’s apparition say: “the CIA and KGB are not the agents you need to worry about – it’s the intelligent agents stealing, marketing, and re-inventing your identity.” Innis might infer that the new empires are centered not in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing, but in Silicon Valley, Bollywood, Murdock’s News Corp, Pravda.com, and so forth. He might also decry the digital divide and those who live on the margins of electricity. Innis would detest the dominance of the algorithm given the attendant discrimination against consumer choice.
When considering AI, Innis would be concerned about the economics of irreversibly surging white collar AND blue-collar unemployment and the dearth of scholarly rather than cloned thought. And one can hear McLuhan having fun coining new catch phrases like “The auto-mates are now running the asylum” rather than “the inmates are running the asylum.” And then he would add: AI robotics will become the politicians’ running mates who will soon be running… them.” And so on.
When we consume narrative media, directors often suck us into the plot: “We wonder, will the hero die or have a miraculous recovery?” “Will true love prevail despite an erotic third party?” Innis was not nearly as concerned with such storylines as with their environmental context. For example, he noted that huge sectors of Canadian forests were clear cut to supply Canadians with newspapers. So I want to list his conservationist caution as the first of six concerns both men might hold about Artificial Intelligence.
AI: environmental concerns
1) DEPLETION OF RESOURCES: Few people realize, in a way that Innis would flag, that huge amounts of water, electricity, and nuclear power, are needed to run the data centers for AI infrastructure.
2) UNIVERSAL ANONYMITY: Few people will know who is really writing your mail, music, movies, news, ads, websites with new unprecedented technologies. McLuhan might say “if impersonating a police officer is a felony, then what is impersonating a whole species?”
3) A MONOPOLY OF MONOPOLIES: AI provides the potential for one monopoly to monopolize and create all others as fore-shadowed in science fiction classics like Colossus: The Forbin Project – Innis’s nightmare.
4) ALL MEDIA ARE AI: McLuhan might claim that “Artificial Intelligence” is a misnomer since human intelligence became artificial once we let media script our thought. AI is artificial artificial and thus even harder to distinguish from the original.
5) OUTER SPACE BIAS: Innis would be alarmed that our huge bias toward space, including outer space, diminishes the importance of time. The human attention span will greatly decrease with “instant pseudo-encyclopedism.” The grand-children of Chat GPT will make all pre-fabricated “quasi-knowledge” and “art” available instantly in all languages, media, modes, and instrumentation.
6) SOuRCERY: TO ERR IS AUTOMATIC: If much of humanity is pink-slipped by AI, McLuhan would proclaim that we have retrieved the fable of the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” by which the flood of geometrically increasing new data is unstoppable, irreversible, and unverifiable. The story of the sorcerer’s apprentice narrates how a magician’s student learned how to use spells to mobilize mops and brooms to do his work for him. Once he initiated their labor, he couldn’t stop them as they multiplied. “The medium is the sorcerer” means that “sourcerer” is spelled both “soUrcerer” – since we no longer know actual sources – and also “sorcerer” – since we, the sorcerer’s apprentice, have spawned runaway technology we no longer know how to stop nor direct.
In the age of the selfie, we note that McLuhan allegedly coined or borrowed this witticism “As Zeus said to Narcissus, ‘Watch yourself.’” So he would not miss the opportunity to observe that, in the age of Tik-Tok and Instagram, we have become the “watch yourself” age of Narcissus, continually inverting the camera to aim it at ourselves.
A question is often raised, “were Innis and McLuhan ‘media determinists’ who thought media completely sculpt our society and thinking?”
I have an answer which follows the road less travelled. We are familiar with the notion of a play-within-a-play. In Hamlet, the players enact a tale to “catch the conscience of the king.” And in Man of la Mancha, the performers also don additional roles to tell a story within a story. If we look only at the material world of technologies which captivated Innis and McLuhan, we see only story #1, the inner narrative, in which media seem to rule humanity. But there is also an outer story #2 governing the inner story. It is the story of invisible essences which range far beyond machines and microchips.
For example, for spiritual beings (like McLuhan who was a zealous Catholic), there is the world of God, or Gods, or other invisible creative forces which are not controlled by technology – but rather vice versa. Even for those who do not believe in such Divine powers, like Innis, there are other invisible forces which shape existence – such as the laws of nature or nature itself, fate, sunspots, energy fields, the subconscious mind, geophysical forces, uncertainty, and one of the oldest invisible forces – human ideas and consciousness.
Doesn’t it feel more liberating to be part of that larger story – having more personal agency and creative potential –rather than “I am pre-destined by the cookie cutter of Gates–Musk–Zuckerberg 8.0”? After all, who created media and media moguls and how were those creators created?
Innis and McLuhan were in touch with this outer story.
McLuhan was famous for coining the terms “hot media” and “cool media” which describe the degree to which a medium saturates us or leaves information gaps which we must fill in. If a person taking a shower slips, falls, and becomes unconscious, she or he can either become scalded by hot water or frozen by excessive cold, as with so-called hot and cool media. That is the inner story #1. But when that person, no longer drunk on narcissism, awakens and stands up, she has the power to turn the knobs to create a balance between hot and cold media – or to turn off the valves entirely – and to be part of the larger forces of story #2.
So that is the question. Are we willing to draw upon the powers of the outer story and stand up to make conscious choices about our media consumption and evaluation? If so, we can use the wisdom of the outer story as a counterbalance to the seemingly all-controlling inner one.
But how?
Here are seven suggestions about how to exercise personal agency – seven approaches, which I think many within the Toronto School would support if not advocate.
Seven steps to reclaim agency
1) CHOOSE MULTIPLE SOURCES: I once had a cruel colleague who, when a student was walking his way, he would say “Here comes FOX” or “here comes CBS” or “CBC” or “here comes Jon Stewart” or “Jimmy Kimmel” instead of saying the student’s name. For him, media were the ventriloquists and students were the dummies, as he would determine during classroom discussions. So we don’t want to be typecast as a person mindlessly channeling and parroting a solitary media mindset such as “Here comes The Globe and Mail” or “City News.”
2) HEAR YOURSELF THINK: I used to take groups on media fasts and media diets, so we could begin to hear our selves think. What independent thoughts may I generate? What is nature thinking about when we look at the stars and walk in the forest? What is my OWN unique, original thought?
3) BE THE CREATOR – not just the consumer. Learn to make films, or write poems, or create a love song, or blog. Use media to create and express – not just to indoctrinate and hypnotize yourself. McLuhan loved to quote Pound: “Artists are the antenna of the race.”
4) LEARN ABOUT HOW MEDIA WORK: Not just traditional media, but the new conduits which obsolesce our media comfort zone. After all, many are used to siphon millions of our dollars in cyber-fraud and fabricate a hallucinatory view of reality. McLuhan and Innis were not interested in being sucked into the plot or the scam – but rather in the hidden medium itself.
5) USE MEDIA FOR PRO-SOCIAL PURPOSES – to inspire, educate, acknowledge, make people laugh, especially those who have little to laugh about. Both Innis and McLuhan loved socially perceptive and revelatory humor.
6) BEWARE SOURCERY: Learn to distrust the source and content of e-mail, texts, voicemails, and programs by examining the source and the so-called facts – and what is occurring beneath the content.
7) GO DEEPER: Returning to Innis and McLuhan, we might ask “what else is happening here?” “What am I missing?” “Who am I beneath my programming and what may I uniquely probe and perceive?”
These are just suggestions. I’m not recommending we drastically change our lives. That’s up to us, and most of us have our guilty pleasures. But I do agree with Innis, who would call for balance in our employment of communication tools.
As for McLuhan, he was fond of a tale by Edgar Allan Poe, called “A Descent into the Maelstrom” – a story about brothers whose boat was sucked into the edge of a maelstrom or whirlpool. Two brothers drowned – one of whom went crazy imagining his fate. But the third brother studied which objects sucked into the whirlpool, descended, and which types of objects might escape to the top. Ultimately, unlike his brothers, he clung to a cylindrical water cask, flung himself into the ocean, and he lived to tell the harrowing tale.
Some might say we live in a media maelstrom and that both civilization and civility are descending toward rock bottom. Rather than drowning or being driven crazy by an overload of toxic stimuli, cannot one navigate the media whirlpool by the power of observation, critical thinking, and pattern recognition?
But enough of what Innis and McLuhan might think. Their emphasis would be that we do not echo them any more than we constantly parrot media. When I studied within McLuhan’s classroom, he would ask: “Tom, what do you think?” Each person can ask themselves the same question.
So my own thought is this. Much attention is paid to media as hand-held devices, large furniture, platforms, AI, theatrical experiences, signals, propaganda channels, and virtual social communities. These are all external. The key to our relationship with media, is internal. Understanding media means understanding ME-dia. Am I thinking – or are these externals thinking me? Am I aware of my genuine feelings or am I manipulated to cry by the sentimental soaring strings of the soundtrack? How consistently and assiduously do I use my BS-detector or do I let it fall asleep when I become a couch rutabaga? Who am I beneath my programming? How do I become a medium for truth as I know it in a world of deceptive messages? When I am shopping, do I enter a store to buy one product and emerge with five others that I have seen advertised? Do I, without question, ever unthinkingly accept “knowledge” I receive from Chat GPT, Wikipedia, Siri, Alexa, and so forth?
Ultimately, we do have the power to think critically. Genuineness can dispel the artificial, and veritas – truth which passes the test for validity, reliability, and replicability – can help to right the yawing good ship “Wisdom” in an age of disinformation.
If I can go to sleep at night with a clear conscious that I am to my highest vision being a medium myself for humane, accurate, and pro-social messages, I think that matters.
Innis and McLuhan are no longer with us. Although I greatly value their influence, I think it is up to each of us to be genuine influencers of depth, whether or not we have one dozen or million likes or followers. To honor a quote both men used: “Without vision, the people perish.”
I have concluded my book with what both men said in their living and their teaching by example, which was: “Pay attention!” “Be alert!” “Be a lighthouse.” And most important, as McLuhan said to me, “What do you think?”
Professor Tom Cooper taught ethics and media studies at Emerson College. He was a guest scholar at Stanford, Berkeley, the East-West Center and the University of Hawaii during his last sabbatical and at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford, and Cambridge during the preceding sabbatical. The Association for Responsible Communication, which he founded, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Cooper taught at Harvard, where he graduated magna cum laude, and recently served as an “ethics expert” at a United Nations project in Vienna and Athens. A former assistant to Marshall McLuhan, he was a consultant to the Elders Project, which involved Nelson Mandela, Kofi Anan and Jimmy Carter.
Cooper is a playwright with a Ph.D. in theater and media, a union musician who trained at the Royal Conservatory, poet, black belt, blogger and author of eight books and more than two hundred academic and professional articles and reviews. His latest book, Wisdom Weavers, is about the two highly perceptive thinkers, Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, who first alerted us to the extraordinary, often hidden impact that each communication medium has had upon history, our lives, and our “global village”. His musical, “Higher! Higher!” will premiere in October, 2025 at the TAG theater in Honolulu. His previous book, Doing the Right Thing, is about twelve of the most difficult and influential ethical decisions ever made.
