August 14, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™
Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and the Propaganda Sciences™
An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science™
by Nelson S. Thall, Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca.
CENSORSHIP IS NOT THE END OF THE EXPERIMENT
It's What Happens When the Technotrap Is Taken Away!
A Graduate Student of Technology asks:
Australia has been censoring social media for children under 16 since back in December, and hundreds of thousands of accounts have already been removed. This is censorship, plain and simple. But what happens to children who have become heavily dependent on the form and content of these machines?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Without any knowledge of the multi-effects of these electronic machines, children are exposed to both media fallout and advertising fallout. Both the medium and its content! This technology is very addictive and the kids will suffer from withdrawal symptoms just like recovering alcoholics. Because they are very addictive 'mediums.' When access is suddenly removed, the kids can become irritable, lost, bad-mouthing, negative, and tending toward physical violence as they react to a loss of identity and begin a quest to restore it. Slang, itself a form of social violence, may also be on the upswing. Hopefully school athletic programs can help dissipate violent reactions by providing good physical outlets. All these signposts are already part of the media scientist's inventory of the Grammars of Electric Culture and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science.
The machine sets off a process of irritant and counter-irritant. Compare it to the involuntary human process: sand hits the eye and the tears flow. Have Sand, Will Tear. Likewise, a new machine scrubs off identity and leaves the user discarnate. We have no bodies. At the speed of light we have no bodies, images without a body is a nobody. Trapped without a body and is a nobody person. That is the irritant. The involuntary counter-irritant that follows can become another addiction of its own making. The relief becomes the next irritant, and around it goes. That is the Technotrap. The unwise user of technology is trapped by his own insensitivity to the machine's effects, a knight without armor in a savage land, unarmed and without a shield. Have Machine, Will Trap. Have Toy, Will Trap. Have Idol, Will Trap. Our knights without armor have been technotrapped.
What they now require is a Counter-Technotrap. That means conscious knowledge of the effects of the machine and a deliberate study of the counter-irritants introduced to relieve them. Sports, books, conversation, face-to-face play and other human activities may be retrieved, but none is neutral. Each produces effects of its own. And the child cut off from one screen does not necessarily reach for a book. He reaches for video games, for online gambling, for whatever screen has not been closed to him, which is not relief at all but the same irritant under another name. Media scientists must therefore examine what fills the sensory and social vacuum left behind and study the effects of that replacement before the cure becomes the next trap. Censorship is not the end of the experiment. It is the beginning of the next one.
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Source: Reuters, "Meta says it has taken down 756,000 Australian teen accounts as ban enforcement looms," August 13, 2026.
All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence, aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM), was not employed. We hired a stenographer. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
© 2026 Nelson S. Thall. All Rights Reserved.
I can be reached at: nelson@themediumisthemessage.com