July 26, 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.
When the Computer Began to Sing: Digital Man Dances to Get His Body Back
A Student of Technology and Media asks:
Mr. Thall, McLuhan recommended that we study the modes of media in order to bring their hidden assumptions out of the subliminal realm for scrutiny, prediction and control of human purposes. You recently encountered a seemingly trivial TikTok video called “DIGIDI DIGIDI” that appears to reveal the hidden effects of the computer upon language, identity and the human body. How can a popular song disclose what the technological environment is doing to us before either its creators or its audience consciously understand it?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Because true art registers an environmental change before the conscious mind can explain it. Poetry communicates long before it is understood. The artist thinks he has made a song, a dance or an entertainment, yet the form can reveal far more than its maker intended. The media scientist therefore does not begin with what the artist says the work means. He studies what the form itself is doing to language, identity, the senses and the body.
“DIGIDI DIGIDI” looks like disposable TikTok entertainment, but its grammar has been formed by the computer environment. Roughly four fifths of the song is one repeated mouth sound. The words are a small island and the chant is the ocean. The song does not say that the other person feels distant. It says that he does not exist. That is not an emotion but a setting, and the computer has no setting for partly here. Its repeated fragments, exchanged identities and machine-like chant reproduce the digital habit of breaking reality into units that can be copied, switched and recombined. The work may therefore know more about its environment than the people who made it.
The dancers supply the most revealing clue. Electronic communication removes the need for bodily presence, so the human organism answers by exaggerating movement. People dance to recover the body that the digital environment has made unnecessary. But the beat commands that body, the camera captures it, and the platform converts it back into information. The body returns only to become choreography, a repeatable program for other bodies.
That is why the media scientist must act as a detector of real art. True art interrupts our automatic participation in an environment and allows us to see the machinery backstage. What looked like a trivial video becomes an early-warning system. The dancers are not simply performing to the computer. They are performing the human body’s unconscious answer to the machine that caused it to disappear.
THE ORIGINAL DIGIDI DIGIDI DANCER (ON THE LEFT)
https://youtube.com/shorts/cmtbDWyWf50?si=PL-DLoZBVN6OLznj
ANOTHER DIGIDI DIGIDI WITH THE ORIGINAL DANCER
https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSXEoP26U/
DIGIDI DIGIDI (THIS IS HAS LYRICS WITH IT. sorry about the 2 commercials at start. Beyond our control.)
https://youtu.be/6Ldkj-KmQao?si=rdFjFWv-boxv-s36
HERE IS ONE VARIATION WITH THE LYRICS
https://youtu.be/BtFV5_p2zzk?si=UC3KR_K-PsIZn66x
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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