The hybridizing or compounding of these [media] agents offers an especially favorable opportunity to notice their structural components and properties. (Understanding Media, 49) 

The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. (Understanding Media, 66)

When the foundations of chemistry were first being laid around 1800, compounds like mercuric oxide, water and salt were critical in the effort to isolate the physical elements, determine their properties and discover the laws of their combination. McLuhan thought something very similar could be pursued in establishing the new sciences of media.

In fact, of all the great hybrid unions that breed furious release of energy and change, there is none to surpass the meeting of literate and oral cultures. The giving to man of an eye for an ear by phonetic literacy is, socially and politically, probably the most radical explosion that can occur in any social structure. (Understanding Media, 49) 

The ultimate conflict between sight and sound, between written and oral kinds of perception and organization of existence is upon us.(Understanding Media, 16)

Just such a “hybrid union” of eye and ear occurred in McLuhan’s research in the 1950s with an attendant “furious release of energy and change”. Now our research today must revert to his to start again in the effort he initiated to isolate the artefactual elements and their laws in the new sciences of media.