The term guru entered Western currency in the 1960s media environment

Evidence

To their respective followings both men sitting in the ornate oak-paneled restaurant were “gurus,” a word just come into currency in the West. McLuhan was a scholar of the media from the University of Toronto who’d become famous thanks to his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which was full of intriguing pronouncements somehow both bold and enigmatic at once (example: “The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium”). He was referred to, variously, as the “Guru of the Boob Tube” and the “Oracle of the Electronic Age.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 532

Categorization

• DEFINE: Tracks the etymology and adoption of ‘guru’ as a Western media term in the mid-1960s.
• XREF: Connects to McLuhan’s Understanding Media and the broader media-theory tradition, and to the reader’s attention-industries history.