  I don’t really know how fair it was to have introduced McLuhan into our short course without focusing much on his work. His words have buoyed me up during a twenty-year exploration of “media” (whether human, analog, or digital). Though I have bobbled up and down with his words (finding meaning and losing it), I am still peeling back new layers of nuanced ideas. What intrigues me today is the McLuhan revival especially in urlLink business and management . In my search to understand the phenomenon of “creativity” (a word that even as late as 1969 was not included in the OED) McLuhan’s words have galvanized my thinking. In particular, I am more fully aware of the “figure” and “ground” aspect of any medium. Throughout my research, I was drawn again and again to the features McLuhan expressed regarding all media (conceptual or concrete) and this alliance led to my early-formed conclusions regarding “creativity.” I say early because while I defended my thesis, I am still on the journey of discovery that includes the continued exploration of forty leading experts from around the world, and the perusal of the more than 7,000 books, 40,000 academic articles, and 5,430,000 google hits found on the Web!
Yes – it’s definitely one of the more challenging fields of investigation! When I was first introduced to McLuhan in the late 70’s, while studying communications, I was very much aware that his thinking had been drawn from a famous communications theorist, urlLink Harold Innis . I had heard his famous and oft repeated aphorism for urlLink medium and message and we had become more and more familiar with the idea of a “global village” (long before globalization became a reality).
I hope that our final class will bring a not too cursory closure to our term (although I suspect that the mental dialogue will continue long after) as we will journey into urlLink McLuhan's Tetrads (four questions posed to analyze media) as a tool to explore the medium of language, literacy, technology, and other “media” that have been discussed throughout our class and on this blog. Thank you for all of your terrific thoughts expressed in this blog! It has been thoughtful, compelling, humorous and inviting. Great work! 
