August 24, 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 GENERATION THAT LEFT THE CROWD
To Recover the Person, They Had to Turn Off the World.
A Graduate Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, Business Insider reported that young people are forming Luddite Clubs where they put away their smartphones, use flip phones, read books and meet face to face. Many of them grew up with social media and constant electronic connection. Why would they deliberately turn away from the very technologies that brought everyone together?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
McLuhan saw mass man emerge with the telegraph. It did not merely carry messages faster. It made distant events simultaneous and placed everyone inside one common field of information. People became instant and accessible to one another, sharing an electric extension of the central nervous system. The smartphone completes that condition. It enhances connection while making distance, silence and private space obsolete. The individual enters the electric crowd and becomes mass man, not because he stands among many bodies, but because he is continuously involved in everybody else. The medium that promised to bring everyone together finally leaves no interval in which a person can stand apart and discover who he is.
The Luddite Club is the anti-environment that makes this invisible crowd visible. The flip phone, paper book, park bench and face-to-face conversation remove enough of the electric environment for its effects to be felt. They retrieve local space, bodily presence, undivided attention and the pause in which one person can recognize another. These young people are not rejecting communication. They are rejecting communication without interval, because permanent connection can abolish presence. Only by stepping outside the crowd can they see the crowd for what it is. The first generation raised inside total connection is discovering that, to recover the person, they had to turn off the world.
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Sources: Truman Dickerson, “Gen Z’s New Anti-Tech Rebellion: Making Eye Contact and Listening to Each Other,” Business Insider, August 20, 2026; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, “Telegraph: The Social Hormone,” pp. 218–223.
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