August 3, 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, McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada.
The Book That Announces the End of Books:The Warning Became the Entertainment.
A Student of Technology asks:
Yesterday we discussed Rose Horowitch's article in The Atlantic, "The End of Reading Is Here." Today The Times is promoting James Marriott's new book, The New Dark Ages, which reaches much the same conclusion at greater length. Suddenly everyone is announcing the end of reading as though it were breaking news. If this transformation has been underway for decades, why is it only now becoming a headline? Why do changes of this magnitude always seem to be reported long after they have already transformed the culture?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Look first at how the warning reaches you. Marriott is a newspaper columnist. He presented a radio series on the history of literacy. He writes a newsletter on a subscription platform. He reviews podcasts. His book is being launched through a live public event, a room full of people who have paid to hear someone speak. Every step in that chain belongs to the oral or electric world. The defense of print now travels by voice, broadcast, newsletter, podcast, and public performance. Only the object at the end of the chain is a book, and even the book arrives as content inside an environment built by other media.
That is the answer to your question, and it is not a criticism of James Marriott. He is not a hypocrite. He is a resident. Fish do not discover water. They discover nets. Nobody reports the environment he is standing inside because standing inside it is precisely what makes it invisible. Watch what happens to a person's attention, posture, conversation, and judgment in front of a lit screen. The conclusion is not difficult. Yet the specialists rarely perform that observation because they have been trained to study figure while leaving ground untouched. They studied the figure. They never studied the ground.
Marriott correctly senses that something older than books is disappearing and something older than print is returning. But he mistakes retrieval for prediction. The tribe is not coming. The tribe arrived with the telegraph and has been the daily weather of electric culture ever since. The outrage, tribalism, emotional contagion, and instantaneous collective judgment he fears are not tomorrow's possibilities. They are yesterday's inheritance. His readers scrolled through them on their way to reading his warning. This is exactly the condition McLuhan observed in specialist after specialist, which is why he turned to the artist instead. Like Perseus approaching Medusa, the artist refuses to stare directly at the dazzling figure and be turned to stone. He works from the reflection, and the reflection reveals what direct observation cannot: not the content of the medium, but the invisible environment the medium is creating.
Then comes the reversal, and it quietly disposes of the entire debate. A culture that no longer lives primarily through print produces a bestselling book announcing the end of reading. The warning becomes the entertainment. The eulogy becomes another product of the very environment it came to indict. The audience applauds the diagnosis, buys the book, discusses it online, quotes it on podcasts, recommends it on social media, and, in many cases, never finishes reading it. That is not a failure of the book. It is the environment working exactly as it always works. The post-literate man is not the man who cannot read. He is the man who buys the case against himself, agrees with it enthusiastically, and cannot remain with it long enough to be changed by it. He came to warn us about the environment that had already rewritten him.
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Sources: Rose Horowitch, "The End of Reading Is Here," The Atlantic, August 2026. James Marriott, The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society (London: Penguin, 2026); published in North America as The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society (New York: Penguin Random House, 2026). The Times Events, "The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society," August 2026.
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