October 13, 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
WHEN SOCIETY RELIES ON EMOTION AS ITS DEFINITION OF REALITY
The Tribal Consciousness of the Global Theatre
A Student of Technology asks:
Miriam Mattova, a Toronto-based model and advocate with a doctorate in political science, observed in an interview with Benita Levin on i24NEWS that social media has become less a source of news than a source of emotion. People seem more concerned with how an event makes them feel than with what actually happened, as if feeling rather than the event itself now determines what is accepted as real. Are we witnessing something more fundamental than propaganda? Is electric culture changing the very definition of reality upon which society relies?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Professor McLuhan taught that the medium, not its content, reshapes society. Content is the juicy piece of meat the burglar carries to distract the watchdog of the mind. Every technology reorganizes our sensory ratios. Print made the eye dominant, favoring the detached, sequential judgment of literate man. Electric circuitry retrieves the ear and the hand, while my work in Technology Ecology™ identifies a further shift toward tactile and proprioceptive involvement. Change the dominant sense and you change how the mind apprehends content, and therefore the test society applies to decide what is real, without a single post being altered. The emotion Mattova notices cannot be explained by the content alone. It reflects the sensory environment through which that content is received.
Electric technology also retrieves the tribal condition. In the global theatre there are no spectators, only actors. Spectators observe; actors feel. The electrically extended individual, discarnate and uncertain of his identity, reaches for the emotional belonging of the group. Social media promises information but increasingly produces involvement. The informed public reverses into the involved tribe. The tribe is no longer informed. It is involved. No society consciously decides to rely on emotion as its definition of reality. The medium changes the sensory matrix, while its participants, numb to the environment producing that change, mistake collective feeling for independent perception.
That is the Narcissus error at the heart of the TECHNOTRAP™. Jacques Ellul recognized that propaganda feeds upon information rather than being blocked by it. Propaganda ends where dialogue begins, and debate destroys dialogue when winning replaces understanding. Counter-Propaganda Science™ seeks to expose the technological environment organizing our perceptions, restoring the distinction between what we know and what we feel. The observation that all forms of violence are quests for identity becomes especially significant here. When tribal feeling becomes society's definition of reality, disagreement ceases to be an argument to consider and becomes an attack upon the collective self. Under those conditions, retaliation can replace deliberation.
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Sources and Intellectual References:
Miriam Mattova, interview with Benita Levin, i24NEWS. Observation heard and reported by Nelson S. Thall.
Professor McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), Chapter 1, “The Medium Is the Message.”
Professor McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962).
Professor McLuhan, “At the moment of Sputnik the planet became a global theater in which there are no spectators but only actors,” Journal of Communication (1974).
Professor McLuhan and Wilfred Watson, From Cliché to Archetype (1970).
Professor McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (1988).
Professor McLuhan, interview with Mike McManus, TVOntario (1977), on violence as a quest for identity.
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1965 English translation).
Nelson S. Thall, TECHNOTRAP™, Technology Ecology™ and Counter-Propaganda Science™.
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