May 25, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ — McDialogue™
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.
Is Artificial Intelligence Completing the Technotrap™
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, major technology companies are increasingly using artificial intelligence to summarize articles, books, emails and search results so people no longer need to read the original material themselves.
Critics warn that people are beginning to consume conclusions without experiencing the sequence of thought that produced them.
But did this process actually begin much earlier with the telegraph, radio and television, all of which gradually conditioned the nervous system away from linear sequence and toward simultaneity?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Yes. Artificial intelligence is not the beginning of this process. It is the culmination of a much older electric environment that began with the telegraph in the nineteenth century.
Print culture trained the eye and nervous system to think sequentially, line by line, page by page. It created habits of continuity, sustained attention and linear logic. But the telegraph shattered that condition by introducing instantaneous information moving at electric speed across vast distances.
Radio intensified the process by surrounding the listener acoustically and emotionally. Television accelerated it further by immersing the viewer in simultaneous visual information. The smartphone completed the enclosure by making the electric environment continuous, portable and inescapable.
Artificial intelligence summarization is simply the latest extension of this long process. People now consume conclusions without experiencing the sequence of thought that produced them.
The danger is not merely intellectual laziness. The technologies are silently retuning the sensory typology itself. They reorganize the balance and dominance of the senses beneath conscious awareness.
This occurs regardless of content. Whether one consumes news, politics, Shakespeare or entertainment is secondary. The environmental effect of the medium itself remains constant. This is further proof of McLuhan’s insight that the medium is the message.
This is what I call the ‘Technotrap’™. The population believes it is merely using convenient tools while the electric environment invisibly reshapes attention, perception, identity and consciousness itself.
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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.
I can be reached at nelson@themediumisthemessage.com