《传播的偏向》集结了一些略文经修订的旧文。集结的目的是便于读者翻检，同时也便于以更加详尽的形式支持我在《帝国与传播》中提出的主题。《传播的偏向》试图回答一篇心理学文章提出的一个问题，在《传播的偏向》中，伊尼斯用大量的篇幅描写了学习过程中的口头法和书面法的对立。在《挑剔的批评》一章中，他解释说：“我偏向于口头传统，尤其是希腊文明中反映出来的口头传统。我认为有必要重新把握其神韵。”

本书着重研究了新的信息流动模式对社会行为的影响。作者继承了场景理论和媒介理论，提出了将面对面的交往研究与媒介研究联系在一起的切入点：社会“场景”结构。作者认为电子媒介影响社会行为的机制是：角色表演的社会舞台进行了重新组合等。

When Marshall McLuhan first coined the phrases global village and the medium is the message in 1964, no-one could have predicted today's information-dependent planet. No-one, that is, except for a handful of science fiction writers and Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media was written twenty years before the PC revolution and thirty years before the rise of the Internet. Yet McLuhan's insights into our engagement with a variety of media led to a complete rethinking of our entire society. He believed that the message of electronic media foretold the end of humanity as it was known. In 1964, this looked like the paranoid babblings of a madman. In our twenty-first century digital world, the madman looks quite sane. Understanding Media: the most important book ever written on communication. Ignore its message at your peril.