Marshall McLuhan (1911-80) 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 Message (1967).

Edmund S. Carpenter (1922-2011) was an archaeologist, visual anthropologist, media theorist, filmmaker, teacher, author, and curator. On faculty with the University of Toronto, he conducted fieldwork in the Canadian Arctic in the early 1950s. He subsequently founded an anthropology and film program at California State University, Northridge, and studied the impact of modern media on tribes in Papua, New Guinea. Carpenter later spent a decade organizing the research archive of Carl Schuster, in Basel, Switzerland, publishing the twelve-volume Social Symbolism in Ancient & Tribal Art (1986-88).