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 Does James Joyce Matter To Those Who Long To Survive Living At And Beyond The Speed Of Light?
A Student of Technology asks:
We are one week away from Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce was not merely a novelist. He was one of the great explorers of human consciousness, and a thinker upon whose shoulders Professor Marshall McLuhan stood in advancing our understanding of how human nature interacts with the new electric environment. Why does James Joyce matter to those who long to survive living at and beyond the speed of light?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
One week from now the world will mark Bloomsday, and yet few who celebrate it have read Ulysses, and fewer still understand why Professor Marshall McLuhan placed Joyce among the most important explorers of the modern world. What did McLuhan see that most people missed?
He saw that the deepest effects of technology fall not upon our machines but upon ourselves, and that Joyce had been charting those effects long before anyone had a name for them. Decades before the Internet, social media, and Artificial Intelligence, Joyce was investigating what happens to human awareness when all things begin to occur at once.
For thousands of years mankind lived in a world governed by sequence, distance, and delay. Information travelled slowly. Events unfolded one after another. Then electricity abolished distance, and instantaneity became the dominant condition of life. The entire human race was thrust into a new electric environment, and Joyce grasped a simple truth about it: when the environment changes, consciousness changes with it.
You can watch him stage this. In the “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses, Joyce scatters nineteen short scenes across Dublin within a single hour, cutting between citizens who brush past one another, half-notice one another, and never connect. No one stands at the centre. The reader hovers above the whole city, experiencing it all at once. That is not the old linear world of one-thing-after-another. That is the electric world of simultaneity, mapped on paper years before the technologies that would make it everyone’s daily condition.
This is why McLuhan recognised in Joyce a fellow explorer. Both men understood that technology changes our perceptions, our identities, and finally our grasp of reality itself, and that in a world where all times and places become present at once, identity becomes the hardest thing to hold onto.
So those who wish to survive living at and beyond the speed of light would do well to study Joyce, because the real challenge of the electronic age was never technological. The question is not whether our machines can survive the future. The question is whether human consciousness can survive the environments our inventions create.
That is why James Joyce matters!
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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