McLuhan's vision still matters today?

I pose the title as a question because I do believe that McLuhan enunciated a really important insight in the soundbite "the medium is the message". The article I've linked to Why McLuhan's chilling vision still matters today | Douglas Coupland | Comment is free | The Guardian is to be commended at the level of giving a reasonable account of McLuhan's insight but I'm concerned that for some reason, the author slips back into the hand-wringing popular trope which essentially sees anything new media-wise as a dire threat to civilisation and a sign that the barbarians are at the gates.

"what's spooking us all is the inevitable message of these new media: what will be the psychic fallout of these technologies on our inner lives?
Time seems to be going much faster than it once did. We don't remember numbers any more. Certain forms of storytelling aren't working for us as they once did. And what's happening to democracy? As with TV in the 1950s, don't be fooled by the content of texts or blogging or online shopping. Look at what these media are doing to our souls. That's what McLuhan did."

Of course, I'm concerned that I'm taking issue with Douglas Coupland! But it does seem to me, puzzlingly, that Coupland writes with an emotional veneer of the woe-to-us variety. He is right, I think, that we should ask what the psychic effect might be. It is right that we should consider that among the effects will be "fallout". What we need to remind ourselves also is that among the effects will be ways of doing things that will have positive dimensions as well as challenges. Let's remember (and I keep banging on about this) that mass-produced books and high literacy rates met with similar doom-mongering back in the day. Yes some of that doom-mongering was accurate (people don't memorise books and the way that we process and retrieve information and make arguments was affected) but it also didn't figure on the way that we are freed up to concentrate on flows of argument and to be able to question authorities. So let's not just have a wake for the things we like that will be harder or obscelesce but begin to make space for the new and helpful things that can come to birth.

McLuhan also clues us in to this: in talking about media as "extensions of man (sic)": what capabilities does it extend and how can this help us at its best, and how do we plan to minimise the down-sides?