October 6, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™ Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science™ 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. and McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada
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Smart Glasses and the Narrowing of Attention
A Student of Technology asks:
At its Connect event last month, Meta showed new glasses that put a screen in front of your eyes, controlled by where you look and how you move your hands. They're due next spring. Years ago, researchers at University College London found that when people were busy with a hard visual task, as many as 79 percent failed to notice a sound they could plainly hear. If we start reading through glasses like these instead of from a printed page, what happens to the rest of our senses?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
The words on the page stay the same. The conditions of reading do not. A printed page is lit from outside: light falls on it, and the reader stands back and looks at it. In these glasses the light comes through, straight into the eye, and the page has no place of its own. It hangs before the eyes wherever they turn. Professor McLuhan showed that print organized the senses around a detached eye moving in a straight line, one thing after another, while electric media pull the senses into play all at once. A still page floating in the glasses may keep print's order for a while. But let the words share the field with sound, with moving images, with a display that answers every glance and gesture, and the page dissolves into its surroundings. The question is no longer what the eye sees. It is how seeing, hearing and acting are being reorganized together, and which of them loses out.
Here is the reversal. The glasses are sold as an expansion of perception: more before the eyes, more in the ears, more at the fingertips. Pushed far enough, expansion flips into narrowing. The study you mention is the clue. Those people were not deaf. Their eyes were simply too busy, and the ear, which we trust as our early warning, went quiet without telling them. That experiment used a screen on a desk, not glasses on the face, so it proves no permanent change. But it shows the direction of travel: more in front of the eyes does not mean more awareness of the world. It can mean less. So who do we become, wearing a page that is always open, always lit, always asking to be read? People who notice what is shown to them and miss what is happening around them. The danger is not simply that we might misread the display. It is that we might read the display and miss the world.
Sources: Meta Connect 2026, September 23, 2026 (via TechCabal); James S. P. Macdonald and Nilli Lavie, "Visual perceptual load induces inattentional deafness," Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 73 (2011): 1780 to 1789. Marshall McLuhan, [citation pending].
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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. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
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I can be reached at: nelson@themediumisthemessage.com