In 1964, a 53-year-old professor of English literature called Marshall McLuhan published a book called Understanding Media.

It was brilliant but obtuse in its wide-ranging intellectual flourishes. It described new media - like television and radio and magazines and paperback books - as "extensions of man". It also contained a phrase, which has gone on to have exponential meaning ever since: "the medium is the message".

This slogan became one of the forces fuelling The Medium is the Massage. (Yes. Massage.) McLuhan’s encyclopedic ideas were presented as quick-fire bursts of bold words and fragmented images. Readers were being told: this is what accelerated advances in technology and communication are doing to you.

A clever play on words by Marshall McLuhan? His son Dr Eric McLuhan, on the website of the McLuhan estate, suggests that the title was a “typo”.

He says it should have read “ the Message” but it came back from the typesetters with the error. When McLuhan saw “the Massage” he wanted it left as it was.