The continued commemoration of the 100th birthday of Marshall McLuhan has included contemplation of how his influence should be permanently represented in Toronto. Historical plaques are nice and all — but the rustic McLuhan Coach House, relatively hidden along Queen's Park East, may benefit from being a less enigmatic structure.

With a wave of digital upgrades at universities around the globe — particularly just a few blocks away at Ryerson — the centenary couldn't overlook that the building designated for The Centre of Culture and Technology in 1968 has remained in a static state. Shouldn't a room synonymous with media evolution feel futurist?

The challenge was posed to several architectural firms for a design charrette, held nearby at St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto throughout Monday. The brainstorming marathon culminated in presentations that hypothesized about how to transform the Coach House to help influence a makeover strategy.

Mortality seemed to be on the mind of many attendees at the third and final "Our City as Classroom" event, in honour of the 100th birthday of Marshall McLuhan, in the Appel Salon of the Toronto Reference Library.

The billing for this round, which was squarely focused on the future, ironically appealed most to those who have already experienced more yesterdays than they will tomorrows.

So, what does it say when those who are most conscious about the long-term future of communications won't even be around to see so much of it unfold?

With the intensity of each narrative that gets spun online — political tensions, financial district demonstrations, and a Facebook that offers to chronicle the entire experience of being human — comes craving for clarity on how technology can make our lives better.

A certain magic can only get lost, however, as real and virtual worlds become one and the same.

Considering the limitations of a screen-based society, of course, falls in line with the philosophical bent of McLuhan. The euphoric view that he anticipated the brainwave behaviour that drives social media a half-century before the fact often fails to consider that, in keeping with this Catholic faith, he saw this ticker as a potential time bomb from which salvation should also be sought.

The format of the Monday Night Seminar series at the Toronto Reference Library, moderated by Jesse Hirsh, has demanded nothing more of all attendees than to sit on chairs arranged in a large circle.

Nonetheless, the set-up is different from the conferences in which issues related to media and technology are typically mediated these days, with putative experts lined up at a table. The audiences are beholden to the ego aggregation in front of the room — whether or not they have anything to say.

By contrast, the second of three installments inspired by Marshall McLuhan's 100th birthday, "Our City as Classroom," was almost entirely steered by those with a viewpoint they wanted to express.

And the urge was often motivated by a paradoxical principle: the more time that we spend with our devices, the more we want to talk about their effects — and, ultimately, the degree to which we need to scale back, or tune out.

For many adults, being online lots of the time is still generally seen as the stuff of sloth — even more so by those who feel guilty for forsaking offline interaction. Meanwhile, when it comes to the younger digital natives, educators wonder if there will be any point in trying to pierce through distracted conditioning.

When it comes to finding a community of others suffering from a certain ailment or passionate about a particular topic, though, it's not like any better channels were ever built to bring people together. Going outside for fresh air doesn't satisfy that craving for information and understanding.

So, maybe it's just human nature to take tools that seemed like a miracle 20 years ago for granted.

"You know nothing of my work," Marshall McLuhan's second-most-legendary quote, was invoked on Monday night by a participant at the second of three Monday Night Seminars, hosted by Jesse Hirsh, at the Toronto Reference Library.

And it wasn't a reference to Annie Hall as much as a commentary on the tone of the event itself.

The series theme, "Our City as Classroom," became especially pertinent in the past few weeks. Public libraries became the most prominent subject of debate as Toronto City Hall is on the verge of being run over by Mayor Rob Ford's elusive gravy train.

Naturally, the role of the newest forms of electronic media in municipal protest was worth highlighting. But did that really correlate with the theories developed by McLuhan?

Well, the idea that local government could provide a steady stream of ludicrous entertainment has been realized through social media. Yet those acerbic observations provide a gateway for highlighting issues that genuinely impact everyday life.

The most intriguing counterculture event in Toronto this summer was the 22-hour marathon series of deputations regarding the role of government in providing services to the city. Participation in such an event — the stuff of bland bureaucracy in a past administration — was electrified through digital devices.

McLuhan had this kind of thing in mind, even if he was more likely to align himself with the tax-fighting types, based on how he wasn't too fond of protesters at the University of Toronto of the 1960s.

With the nostalgic overload of McLuhan's 100th birthday behind us, it was arguably more important to consider his laws of media in motion rather than the ever-distant past, even if a few seminar attendees urged for a more direct correlation.