October 19, 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.
Murder: An Attempt to Discover If People Are Real - The Discarnate Man and the Loss of Sensory Reality
A Student of Technology asks: You once wrote, "Murder is an attempt to discover if people are real." How does this startling observation relate to Professor McLuhan's concept of discarnate man and the effects of electric technology upon our perception of reality?
Nelson S. Thall replies: Professor McLuhan recognized that electric technology was transforming man into a discarnate being, everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, detached from the physical body through which he once experienced himself and others. It is the medium, not its content, that does this. Electric media reorganize our sensory matrix. We now live among images and voices with no flesh behind them, and touch and bodily presence, the senses that once confirmed what was real, lose their authority. When the senses that verify reality are displaced, the way the mind takes in the world changes with them. Nothing seems entirely real anymore, including himself. This creates a subconscious irritant, an unrecognized disturbance arising from the loss of bodily presence and sensory certainty. He does not consciously search for reality because he is unaware of what he has lost. Here the medium reverses. Pushed to its extreme, disembodiment flips into a desperate hunger for the most overwhelming bodily experience possible, a violent shortcut back to sensation capable of breaking through the numbness of his electric existence. McLuhan saw this in 1977 when he observed that "all forms of violence are quests for identity."
My observation that "murder is an attempt to discover if people are real" extends that insight. Certain acts of extreme violence may be unconscious responses to this hidden environmental disturbance. The murderer is not consciously testing whether his victim exists. He may be reacting to an unbearable uncertainty about his own existence and the reality of others. The murder is the figure; the discarnate condition that has undermined his sensory relationship with reality is the ground. This is a media-ecological hypothesis, not an explanation of every murder. But it tells us what kind of human being the electric environment can produce: one who can no longer verify that other people exist. If he cannot feel himself as real, he will not feel the reality of anyone else, and the hunger for proof may grow more violent as the numbness deepens.
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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.
© 2026 Nelson S. Thall. All Rights Reserved.
I can be reached at: nelson@themediumisthemessage.com