The annotations in the left column are provisional glosses of my own. Highlighting can be very distracting to readers, especially when it is someone else’s, so I have tried to use it sparingly. Highlightings are a lot like scent-markings, a staking out of territory: lime denotes an interesting passage, yellow a central theme. This field guide began life as a self-help project. While it is entirely possible others may find it useful, I have tried to observe a strict discipline in interpreting McLuhan’s book: to write exclusively for myself; for I noticed that as soon as I began to think of these notes as product (rather than process), the adventure of free association failed and I lost touch with the material.
.. McLuhan did not index his books; he was a firm believer in the part played by intervalin human understanding and he may have felt that a specialist approach to his ideas would isolate and strip them of their rich elliptical associations.