

McLuhan had insight into the predicament of the artist. He rightly defined the artist broadly. He states, “The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.” (71) Or as Aristotle put it, the poet doesn’t make any particular or specific statements. He/She tells us not what happened, but what usually happens. McLuhan and Aristotle are referring to inductive reasoning. The distinction between the two is that of deductive fact and that of inductive universal truth. Neil Postman one such “artist,” refers to the arrival of ‘new knowledge’ as “great media-metaphor shift[s].” (Amusing Ourselves to Death 16)