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McLuhan’s depiction of modern life as a global village and ‘one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetting and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early “mistakes”’ could have been written for the social media age.

Louise Willder • Blurb Your Enthusiasm: A Cracking Compendium of Book Blurbs, Writing Tips, Literary Folklore and Publishing Secrets

Said McLuhan: “Print technology created the public. Electric technology created the mass.”34

Jeff Jarvis • The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet

Quote I’m pondering

“Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed. He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s

The medium is the message.
—Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the 'content' of any medium is always another medium.” In the case of neural media, the content is all of network media. This is quite literally the case with large language models and image generators trained on massive corpuses of text and imagery scraped from the web.

Neural Interpellation

McLuhan’s view is that mediums matter more than content; it’s the common rules that govern all creation and consumption across a medium that change people and society. Oral culture teaches us to think one way, written culture another. Television turned everything into entertainment and social media taught us to think with the crowd.

Ezra Klein • I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message

[Patricia Greenfield] concluded that “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies has led to the “widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills.” We can, for example, rotate objects in our minds better than we used to be able to. But our “n... See more

Nicholas Carr • The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.

Marshall McLuhan • Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon - Understanding Media_ the Extensions of Man_ Critical Edition-Gingko Press

That’s why McLuhan said that every time a new medium comes along—a new way for humans to communicate—it has buried in it a message. It is gently guiding us to see the world according to a new set of codes. The way information gets to you, McLuhan argued, is more important than the information itself.