To their respective followings both men sitting in the ornate oak-paneled restaurant were "gurus," a word just come into currency in the West. McLuhan was a scholar of the media from the University of Toronto who'd become famous thanks to his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which was full of intriguing pronouncements somehow both bold and enigmatic at once (example: "The 'content' of any medium is always another medium"). He was referred to, variously, as the "Guru of the Boob Tube" and the "Oracle of the Electronic Age."

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 532