On the Enduring Relevance of Marshall McLuhan

Innovating within an existing platform is always a challenge, because as media theorist Marshall McLuhan argued decades ago, ‘the medium is the message’. TikTok and Twitter/X have short-form content built into the design of the platform, which prevents depth. As I explore in The Bigger Picture, this also leads to what philosopher C. Thi Nguyen call... See more

McLuhan argued that, pushed to its limits, a medium flips or reverses its characteristics. Internet scale pushes information into disinformation, connection into loneliness, and desire into apathy.