June 18, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ — McDialogues™
An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™
by Nelson S. Thall, McLuhan Media Scientist / Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca.
Why Does Nobody Believe The Experts Anymore?
A Student of Technology asks:
In an age of information overload, the average person is exposed to more information in a single day than previous generations encountered in weeks. Everybody seems informed. Everybody has an opinion. Everybody has an answer. Yet trust in experts, institutions, universities, governments and journalists keeps falling.
Why does nobody believe the experts anymore?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
For centuries expertise was built upon scarcity. Information moved slowly. Knowledge was concentrated in books, universities, governments, churches and professional institutions. The expert possessed information that ordinary people could not easily obtain.
Electric technology destroyed that environment.
Today information arrives instantaneously and simultaneously from every direction. The ordinary citizen is bombarded with it all day. Under such conditions, everyone begins to feel informed. And when everyone feels informed, everyone feels qualified to have an opinion on everything.
The result is the rise of the know-it-all.
The expert has not lost knowledge. The expert has lost exclusivity. The information monopoly that once supported authority has dissolved. Credentials no longer command automatic deference. They must now compete against countless alternative voices.
Television had already been reflecting this figure back to society long before the Internet arrived. Archie Bunker, Ralph Kramden, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Dr. House, Sheldon Cooper, Frasier Crane, Dr. Becker. All variations of the same archetype, the person who always has an answer. Audiences laughed because they recognized the character. Like Narcissus gazing into the pool, society was looking at itself without recognizing itself.
The most popular television character of the electric age was not the hero, the villain or the lover. It was the know-it-all.
In an information-soaked environment, everybody feels informed, everybody has an opinion, and increasingly everybody behaves like an expert.
The medium is still the message.
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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