August 13, 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.
THE ATLANTIC MISTOOK THE FIGURE FOR THE WHOLE
The Content Is Print. The Environment Is Electric.
A Graduate Student of Technology asks:
Rose Horowitch's Atlantic cover story, "The End of Reading Is Here," argues that Americans may be reading more words than ever, but increasingly on electronic screens rather than on the printed page. She names McLuhan four times and calls him the patron saint of media theorists. Yet in nine thousand words devoted to how media alter consciousness, she never examines the one difference that separates the two acts: printed words are read by light on, electronic words by light through. Didn't McLuhan teach us in Understanding Media that these are two entirely different sensory experiences?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
That omission is astonishing in an article claiming to explain the end of reading. The Atlantic counts words and calls both activities reading because the content looks identical. McLuhan taught us to ignore that distraction and examine the medium. With print, light falls upon the page and is reflected back to the eye. It is light-on. The fixed printed surface intensifies the visual sense and encourages the detached, linear, sequential habits associated with literate man. On the electronic screen, the word arrives by light-through. The alphabet may be identical, but the sensory environment is not. To call both simply "reading" is to study the figure and miss the ground, and therefore to miss the first principle of media study.
That distinction helps explain the very evidence Horowitch presents. She reports that people reading on phones are invited into scrolling, hyperlinks, notifications, interruption, and shallower comprehension, yet treats these largely as distractions surrounding reading. But those interruptions do not exhaust the difference. Silence the notifications and strip out the hyperlinks and the comprehension still falls, because you have not turned a light-through screen into a light-on page. The medium remains different. The screen does not recreate the sensory conditions of the printed page simply because somebody puts alphabetic characters on it. The content is print. The environment is electric. And as McLuhan spent his career demonstrating, it is the environment that silently rearranges the ratio of the senses.
That is the extraordinary blind spot in The Atlantic's analysis. The article correctly observes that Americans can consume more words while becoming less literate, but never follows its own evidence to the medium itself. Consider the study at the center of her case. It counted print on paper and print on e-ink, every one of them light-on. The phone does not appear in the count at all. She has built an instrument out of reflected light and used it to announce the death of everything it cannot see. Reading has not merely declined. Reading changed when its light changed direction. The printed word was light-on and intensified the eye. The electronic word is light-through and stresses the audile-tactile sensory world. The alphabet survived as content while the sensory environment that created literate man disappeared beneath it. Horowitch sees the figure and mistakes it for the whole. McLuhan would have asked her to look at the ground.
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Sources: Rose Horowitch, "The End of Reading Is Here," The Atlantic, August 2026 (print title: "The Age of Reading Is Over"); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media.
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