August 6, 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.
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When Progress Stops Moving Forward:The Nobody in the Crowd Tries to Become Somebody.
"History is now." — T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, electricity gives us the whole cultural past at once, while the enormous speed-up of change carries us through centuries in a decade. At the same time, the individual is increasingly absorbed into the electronic crowd. What effect does this condition have on music, art, poetry, and on our sense of identity?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Progress does not stop because nothing changes. It stops as a story of one thing replacing another. Under electricity, the whole past becomes simultaneous. Chant, symphony, jazz, rock, hip-hop, epic, sonnet, icon, collage, and advertisement all occupy the same present. We can pass through centuries of culture in an afternoon, but the human nervous system cannot inwardly digest centuries at that speed. The whole of history becomes available and thereby ceases to be history, because nothing is past when everything is present at once, and possessing all of it is indistinguishable from having none. McLuhan's point is that when everything is present at once, the individual loses the historical ground from which he once knew where he stood and who he was. He merges with the crowd and becomes one more nobody inside it.
Music, art, and poetry therefore cease moving forward in a line and begin moving sideways across the entire archive. Music samples, remixes, and retrieves the tribal beat. Art quotes the past and assembles fragments. It turns the artist himself into a costume or brand. Poetry retrieves chant, aphorism, incantation, and the slogan. The arts become increasingly tribal because the crowd supplies the identity the individual can no longer sustain alone. A beat synchronizes bodies, an image provides a mask, and a phrase gives the tribe something to repeat. Poetry communicates long before it is understood, which is why it can produce either revelation or propaganda.
Pushed far enough, the availability of every possible identity reverses into the possession of none. People seek louder music, more shocking images, more extreme performances, and more absolute slogans because intensity gives the nobody a temporary outline. Violence becomes another means of announcing, "I exist." Yet serious art can still provide a counterenvironment in which the individual sees the crowd without surrendering the Private Citadel of Consciousness to it. At electric speed, the arts no longer merely express identity. They become the means by which the nobody in the crowd tries to become somebody. T. S. Eliot wrote that when all time is eternally present, "all time is unredeemable."
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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.
© 2026 Nelson S. Thall. All Rights Reserved.
I can be reached at: nelson@themediumisthemessage.com