The present volume to this point might be regarded as a gloss on a single text of Harold Innis: "The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century."

p. 216; McLuhan here quotes "Minerva's Owl" (1947), by Innis, an address to the Royal Society of Canada, published in The Bias of Communication (1951) - The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)