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“A difficult to find item of McLuhaniana is the DEW line card deck, printed in 1969 as an adjunct to "The Marshall McLuhan DEW-Line Newsletter”, published from 1968 to 1970.

The DEW Line was of course an integrated chain of some 63 radar and communication stations, stretching 3,000 miles across Arctic Canada at approximately the 69th parallel, from Alaska to the eastern shore of Baffin Island. Completed in 1957, a later extension connected eastern Canada to Greenland. Built at the height of the Cold War, with its threat of nuclear annihilation, the system was designed to provide advance warning of imminent air attack to Canada and the United States.

The DEW Line became a perfect metaphor for McLuhan on the role of art and the artist at a time of rapid social and technological change and he repeated the idea frequently. For example, he wrote in Understanding Media (1964): “I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”

Photo: Distant Early Warning (by scottboms)