Mystified I stopped reading McLuhan, within minutes Eco saves the day

About 5 years ago, I decided to give Marshall McLuhan another go. When I was in unversity 30 years ago, I tried reading him but I found much of what he wrote inpenetrable. What I was really wanting to read was an essay entitled Hyperreality by Umberto Eco which I had just picked up from the library but since I was making some headway with McLuhan I decided to keep plugging on with McLuhan until I got to a part where he started to refer to things as being red or green. I had absolutely no idea what he meant. Irritated by his lack of consideration for his readers, I threw the book on the floor and picked up Eco's book. </p> <p>Up until that point I had never read anything by Eco and knew nothing of his area of expertise. I had recently come across a quote from his essay on Hyperreality which is what sparked my interest. Even though I was very keen to start reading the essay, I looked at the Index and saw an essay entitled "Guerilla Warfare" a topic which doesn't hold much interest for me. For whatever reason I decided to look at that essay. The absolutely first thing I read when I went to the essay entitled guerilla warfare was 'most people don't understand what Marshall McLuhan means by red and green' followed by Eco explaining what red and green means. It turned out that an essay entitled Guerilla Warfare was in fact an essay about Marshall McLuhan!<br /> I was stunned. After throwing a rather obscure book written in the 60s on the floor because I couldn't understand the author, I pick up another book written 50 years later and open it to a page which clearly defined the terms I found inexplicabe. C.C. </p> <p>