June 9, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ — McDialogue™
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.
Why Are So Many People Searching For Their Ancestors?
A Student of Technology asks:
Genealogy has become a global industry. Millions of people have submitted their DNA in search of ancestral origins. Heritage tourism keeps expanding. Indigenous peoples are seeking cultural renewal. Ethnic, national, and regional identities have reasserted themselves. Popular entertainment is increasingly filled with stories about clans, bloodlines, dynasties, inheritance, and belonging. Why are so many people searching for their ancestors?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Most people assume the growing interest in ancestry, genealogy sites, DNA testing, and heritage tourism is simply a matter of curiosity. Marshall McLuhan would have disagreed. He would have asked a sharper question. Why are millions of people drawn to their roots at the very same moment in history?
To answer that, we have to understand what happened to mankind over the past 3,500 years.
Tribal societies communicate through the ear, the voice, and the sense of touch. People speak to one another rather than write to one another. Knowledge is shared collectively, and identity is rooted in kinship, ancestry, family, and tribe. Tribal people care far more about lineage and belonging than literate people do, because their sense of self comes less from the individual and more from the clan.
The phonetic alphabet began a long process of detribalization. Writing shifted attention toward the eye and away from the ear. Literacy encouraged individualism, specialization, and detachment. The process reached its peak with Gutenberg’s printing press, what McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy, and for centuries Western civilization grew steadily more visual and more individualistic.
Then electricity arrived.
Radio, television, and the electronic media that followed began to reverse the process. Electric technology favors the ear, the voice, and the participatory senses. It compresses time and space and pulls people back into collective forms of awareness. McLuhan called this retribalization. The television generation, he said, is postliterate and retribalized.
The pattern showed itself early. In 1977 the television series Roots, drawn from Alex Haley’s book, became one of the most watched broadcasts in American history, and almost overnight millions of people were gripped by questions of ancestry, lineage, and belonging. A nation raised on print suddenly wanted to know its tribe. It was retribalization arriving in prime time.
Today the same current runs everywhere you look: in the DNA kits and the genealogy databases, the heritage tours, the revival of Indigenous and ethnic identities, the endless screen stories about clans, bloodlines, and inheritance. These are usually treated as separate trends. They are not. They are surface signs of one deep environmental change. What looks like a fashion for ancestry is really the electric environment retribalizing society.
So the real question is not why people are searching for their ancestors. The real question is why the electric environment is making ancestry matter again.
Here McLuhan offers the key. To understand any society, first find its dominant sense. The alphabet and print raised the eye above the other senses and detribalized mankind. Electric media are lowering the eye again and restoring the ear, the voice, and the sense of touch. Change the dominant sense and you change the kind of people a society produces.
The growing hunger for lineage, kinship, and belonging is the proof. The medium is the message, and the message of our age is the tribe.
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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