August 23, 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 EYE IN HIGH DEFINITION
How ignorance of phonetic literacy’s hidden grammar left us blind to the electronic environment and vulnerable to AI.
A Student of Technology asks: Schools are beginning to teach students how to use artificial intelligence, but are they starting at the wrong end? What made the phonetic alphabet such a unique high technology, and how did our failure to teach its real effects leave society unprepared for radio, television, and now vulnerable to enslavement by AI?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
The phonetic alphabet was unique because it separated sound from meaning and translated speech into a small number of visual signs. A picture or an ideogram keeps some connection to an object or a whole idea, but a phonetic sign is almost empty by itself, and that emptiness was its extraordinary power. A few dozen meaningless units could be combined to encode any spoken language. In training people to proceed along a visual line, one sign after another, phonetic literacy separated the eye from the ear and pulled sight into high definition. It made sequence, division, classification, abstraction, and detached analysis appear natural. It did not merely give Western man a way to record his thoughts. It reorganized the senses by which he thought.
Print is not simply more alphabet. It is the mechanization and industrialization of the alphabet, and the printed book was the first teaching machine and the first mass-produced commodity. Gutenberg gave alphabetic culture uniformity, repeatability, and identical copies at speed, intensifying fixed point of view, private authorship, specialization, nationalism, industrialism, mass markets, and the separation of thought from feeling. The school therefore did more than fail to teach the effects of print. The school itself became one of print's most powerful environments, teaching the subject on the page while silently teaching the sensory and social grammar of the page. Radio and television then reversed that visual order by working all at once, restoring simultaneity, participation, emotion, and tribal involvement, while the print-trained mind went on looking only at the content and missed the environment. McLuhan's answer was not panic. It was to stand aside and study the form.
AI now deepens the same crisis because it does not merely transmit words and images. It begins to participate in composing, remembering, and sorting. Like the alphabet before it, AI operates below the level where most people are watching while they argue about the content it produces. Mere opposition is not enough, because the opponent may still be standing inside the technology, quarreling about what it carries rather than studying what it does. What weakens its hidden power is intelligibility. Make the operation visible and much of its grip is lost. We taught the alphabet but never put its effects on the syllabus. We must not repeat that mistake with AI. The chatbot is the figure. The surrender of human judgment to an invisible technological environment is the ground. The chains will not look like chains. They will look like convenience and assistance. Until schools teach the grammar of technology itself, AI literacy may produce efficient users who remain helpless before what the machine is doing to them. That is how AI is enslaving us without ever appearing to command.
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Sources: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
Copyright © 2026 Nelson S. Thall. All rights reserved.
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