🎧 Show Notes (The Human Voice with Bob Hutchins):

In this special episode, Bob Hutchins sits down with Dr. Tom Cooper—media ethicist, scholar, and former assistant to Marshall McLuhan—to unpack the lives and legacies of two of the most influential (and often misunderstood) thinkers in media history: Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan.

Dr. Cooper shares insights from his new book Wisdom Weavers, offering rare stories from his time at the University of Toronto, reflections on the inner lives of both men, and how their ideas help us understand our AI-saturated, media-driven world today.

We explore:

Why Innis and McLuhan still matter in 2025
How their contrasting backgrounds (a stoic economist vs. a poetic provocateur) converged into a shared vision
The quiet presence of women behind their work
What McLuhan might say about AI, selfies, and the illusion of intelligence
How both thinkers anticipated today’s blurred line between human and machine communication

Whether you’re new to media ecology or deep in the trenches, this episode is a rich entry point to understanding the patterns behind the platforms—and why awareness, not alarm, might be our most important tool.

📚 Mentioned:

Wisdom Weavers: The Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan by Tom Cooper
The Toronto School of Communication
McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Pinocchio, and other McLuhan metaphors
AI, ethics, and modern-day media fasts

Tom Cooper is a media scholar, author, and former assistant to Marshall McLuhan. He earned his doctorate at the University of Toronto, where he studied with leading figures in the Toronto School of Communication, and later taught media ethics for decades at Emerson College after earlier roles at Harvard.

He is the founder of the Association for Responsible Communication, which was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and previously served as an assistant speechwriter in the White House. Over his career, he authored more than ten books and 300 published articles and reviews, weaving together scholarship, ethics, and global engagement.

Cooper’s sabbatical work as a guest scholar took him to Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, and other leading institutions. He is also a black belt in Tae Kwon Do—a reminder that his commitment to discipline and balance extended beyond the classroom.

Wisdom Weavers & Media Ecology: A Conversation with Dr. Tom Cooper