September 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.
SELF-AMPUTATION FORBIDS SELF-RECOGNITION:
HEALING A DAMAGED COLLECTIVE MINDSET
A Student of Technology asks:
If every medium extends us but also numbs us to what it is doing, what happens when that numbness operates across an entire society? Can it leave us vulnerable to fabricated realities and Technotraps™, and if so, how do we regain enough self-recognition to see the trap?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Every medium is a tranquilizer. The human faculty that is technologically extended is also amputated and therefore becomes numb. Self-amputation forbids self-recognition. At the collective level, the fragment becomes a figure to a hidden ground, and the collective consciousness becomes an accumulation of memories, some real and some fabricated. The fabrication of events can therefore produce a parallel reality capable of mobilizing an entire society. The American belief that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction is an example. After thousands of lives were lost and enormous human and material costs incurred, the truth surfaced that the weapons were not there. A fabricated reality had been placed in the position of reality. That is a Technotrap™.
Overcoming the Technotrap™ means making the hidden ground visible. It means bringing the assumptions that govern perception up out of the subliminal realm so that they can be recognized and examined. Professor McLuhan put the method this way: “All my recommendations, therefore, can be reduced to this one. Study the modes of media in order to hoik all assumptions out of the subliminal non-verbal realm for scrutiny and for prediction and control of human purposes.” The antidote to the Technotrap™ is therefore self-recognition: making conscious what the medium has made invisible.
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Sources: Marshall McLuhan; Iraq Survey Group findings on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
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