Culture Is Our Business is Marshall McLuhan's sequel to The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. Returning to the subject of advertising newly armed with the electric sensibility that informed The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium Is the Massage, McLuhan takes on the mad men (a play on the ad men of Madison Avenue) of the sixties. Approaching commercial messages as unacknowledged art forms and cultural artifacts, McLuhan delivers a series of probes that pick apart their meanings and underlying values, their paradoxes and paralogisms, and their overt function as persuasion and propaganda. Through humor, satire, and a poetic sensibility, he provides us with a serious exploration of the consumer culture that emerged out of the electronic media environment. In keeping with the participatory ethos of the Internet that McLuhan so clearly anticipated, this is a book that is meant to open the door to further study, reflection, and discussion, and to encourage the development of critical reception on the part of the reader.

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a pioneer Canadian theorist and educator in the fields of communication and media studies. He taught at the University of Toronto from 1946 to 1979 and became popular for his aphorism, the medium is the message, which summarized his view of the media's potent influence on shaping culture and styles of thinking. His major writings include The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Understanding Media (1964), and The Medium Is the Massage (1967).