June 23, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ — McDialogues™
Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science
by Nelson S. Thall, McLuhan Media Scientist / Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca.
The Book Didn't Die. It Reversed.
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, a recent article in the European press asks whether the decline of reading and the rise of screens may signal the decline of democracy itself. The article argues that fewer people are reading books, while more and more of life is being conducted through smartphones, social media, streaming video and artificial intelligence. Some scholars fear that the habits fostered by deep reading, reflection, analysis, concentration and independent judgment, are being replaced by a culture of immediacy, emotion and reaction.
Many people assume that the Internet and smartphones are responsible for this transformation. Yet Marshall McLuhan argued decades ago that the shift away from print and toward an electronic form of consciousness began long before the digital age.
When did the book actually begin to lose its dominance, and what does that tell us about the future of reading, democracy and the electric culture in which we now live?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
The book did not lose its monopoly when the Internet arrived. The process began much earlier.
The phonetic alphabet and print created a visual civilization based upon classification, fragmentation, specialization, individualism, nationalism and democracy. For centuries the book served as the dominant environment shaping Western consciousness.
But every medium eventually reverses into its opposite when pushed to its limits. Marshall McLuhan observed that the massive accumulation of printed knowledge had, by the mid-nineteenth century, reached the point at which the entire process "flipped back into the old oral mode."
Then came the telegraph. For the first time in history, information could travel faster than physical objects. Distance collapsed. Events occurring far away became immediate. The visual order of print began yielding to the simultaneous world of electricity.
He pointed to the arrival of commercial telegraphy as a turning point, noting that it was already transforming "prose and poetry, psyche and society." The electric age had begun.
Radio, television, satellites, computers, smartphones and artificial intelligence are not separate revolutions. They are successive stages of the same electric process.
The deeper issue is not whether people are reading more or less. The real question is: what are they reading? Are they reading books (light on), whose phonetic alphabet cultivated, over some 2,500 years, the detached visual habits of private identity, habits that print later hardened into nationalism and democracy? Or are they reading screens(light thru), whose electric nature retribalizes society and shifts attention from the individual to the group?
Nationalism did not exist until people could see the mother tongue in uniform dress. Print standardized language and, in doing so, created the modern citizen. Electric media reverse that process. The planet becomes a stage. Uniform dress gives way to costume. Identity becomes fluid. The result is often a confused society suspended between the values of the literate age and the pressures of the electric age.
The real question is not whether the book is dying.
The real question is whether we understand the new grammar of electric culture that replaced it.
For the book taught us to present only what could be seen as an image of reality to the mind.
The electric environment teaches us how to feel.
And civilizations are shaped by the medium they live inside.
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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