Marshall McLuhan with and on television %28cropped%29.
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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) May 13, 2025: Are the Canadians Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952) and Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), of the University of Toronto, the co-founders of the fabled Toronto School of Media Ecology, relevant to OEN readers today?
Is the founding of media ecology studies relevant to OEN readers today?
In recent months, in many of my OEN articles, I have explored the meaning of become a fan of another person - as I myself became an Ong fan in the fall semester of 1964 when I took my first of five courses from him.
Cooper is clearly a fan of both McLuhan and Innis.
Now, becoming a fan of another person involves becoming infatuated with that other person - in short becoming a fan of another person involves falling in love with that other person.
So, are OEN readers today ready to fall in love with Innis and McLuhan, as Tom Cooper has?
Now, if Innis and McLuhan and the founding of media ecology studies are relevant to OEN readers today, then OEN readers today should welcome Tom Cooper's admirably accessible new 2025 book Wisdom Weavers: The Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan (Connected Editions).
Cooper explains the title W isdom Weavers: "The title 'Wisdom Weavers" refers to their method of synthesizing or weaving quotes, ideas, authors, and knowledge from a wide range of disciplines into fresh patterns of insight upon their editorial looms" (p. 12).
Well, OK. But Cooper's title calls to mind Queen Penelope in the Homeric epic The Odyssey weaving with her loom as a way to distract the suitors as she waits patiently for her husband King Odysseus to return to Ithaca from the ten-year Trojan War.
Now, Cooper's admirably accessible new 660-page book is the revised and updated version of Cooper's 1979 doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto - where both Innis and McLuhan taught for years.
Now, I have described my 28,800-word 665th OEN article titled "Fareed Zakaria and Ezra Klein on President Trump's Foreign Policy" (dated March 24, 2025; viewed 1,800 times) as wide-ranging and, at times, deeply personal:
However, even though my 28,800-word OEN article is indeed wide-ranging for an OEN article, I now need to described Cooper's accessible new 2025 book Wisdom Weavers as extremely wide-ranging for a non-fiction book. For this reason, I find it hard to understand why this wide-ranging 660-page admirably accessible book does not come equipped with an "Index" at the end of the book. So if you should undertake reading Cooper's admirably accessible new 2025 book Wisdom Weavers, I would advise you to use a highlighter to mark names and passages that catch your attention and to which you might want to return for a further look later. I can assure you that Cooper's admirably accessible new book repays attentive reading and careful consideration.
In Cooper's admirably accessible new 660-page 2025 book, he says, "No one knows who first said it [i.e., the term media ecology]" (p. 462).
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