May 11, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ — McDialogue™
An Exploration of Media 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.
When Reality Itself Begins to Feel Fake
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, the editor-in-chief of The Guardian recently wrote, ‘We once talked about fake news. Now reality itself feels fake.’
She said digital media and smartphones seem to be degrading attention spans and altering the way people think.
But Marshall McLuhan predicted decades ago that ‘reality loses its hardware quality at electric speeds.’
Did McLuhan foresee that electric technology would eventually dissolve stable identity and even our sense of reality itself?”
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Yes. McLuhan foresaw it decades ago.
He understood that electric technology does not merely carry information. It alters the entire environment in which human perception operates.
At electric speed reality loses what McLuhan called its ‘hardware quality.’ In the mechanical age people experienced life sequentially and physically. Identity was tied to the body, to location, to work, to community and to long-term goals. But electric technology abolished sequence and replaced it with simultaneity. Everything began happening at once.
At the speed of light there is no stable center because the individual is immersed inside a total field of instantaneous information. The human nervous system becomes surrounded by the crowd electrically. McLuhan said that at electric speeds we are all in a crowd and therefore we become nobodies.
That is why identity panic and violence rise together. Human beings deprived of stable identity become desperate to discover who they are. They seek identity through performance, tribalism, interruption and spectacle. Fantasy becomes a substitute for reality because reality itself no longer feels solid.
This is precisely why the editor of The Guardian says reality itself now feels fake. She is describing the psychological effects of living continuously inside an electric information environment.
The smartphone did not simply change communication. It altered the structure of consciousness itself by hijacking the senses and altering their dominance and order.”
This is why understanding and studying ‘Technology Ecology’™ has become essential. The most powerful effects of technology occur invisibly beneath conscious awareness while the population assumes it is merely using tools, unaware that the tools are simultaneously reshaping the user.”
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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