McLuhan's Understanding Media is a seminal work and one of the books that most shaped my thinking. "Electric Speed is synonymous with light and with the understanding of causes..." That line inspired the name for the Internet consulting company I formed in 1999, and espeed has been my online handle ever since.

  At no period in human culture have men understood 
  the psychic mechanisms involved in invention and 
  technology. Today it is the instant speed of electric 
  information that, for the first time, permits easy 
  recognition of the patterns and the formal contours of 
  change and development. The entire world, past and 
  present, now reveals itself to us like a growing plant 
  in an enormously accelerated movie. Electric speed is 
  synonymous with light and with the understanding of
  causes.

  — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)