Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan is rarely the explicit subject of the essays on this site, but he is the conceptual atmosphere they breathe. The site’s epigraph — “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” — is the McLuhan line that travels through everything else: the claim that tools and media matter not only for what they carry, but for how they reorganize perception, habit, and the social environment around them. That orientation is what makes the essays here read more like media-historical arguments than like product reviews or close readings.

Technologies of Learning, a 2024 Primer is the most explicit application. Its history of CAI, multimedia, hyperlinks, and MOOCs is told as a story of form, not just content — what each generation of educational technology let learners do, and what assumptions about teaching it quietly imported. George Siemens’s epigraph in that essay — “The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today” — is essentially a McLuhanite restatement: the channel shapes what counts as learning. The essay’s diagnosis of MOOCs and contemporary e-learning is consistent: the new format inherits the assembly-line assumptions of industrial schooling, even when the rhetoric of access and personalization claims otherwise.

How We Build Software in the Age of AI carries the same logic into product design. The piece’s core argument — that software has historically been built for humans, with humans serving as the integration layer threading disconnected tools together, and that AI now begins to question both assumptions — is a McLuhanite reading of the present. Photoshop is described as “a craftsperson’s workshop,” the IDE as “where software gets written,” and the human user as “the pipe” that connects everything. Once an agent can be the integration layer, the medium of software changes shape. The essay’s quiet move is to refuse to discuss AI strictly in terms of capability and to ask instead how it reorganizes the environment of work.

Even On Christian Metz moves in a recognizably McLuhanite direction at its edges. The 2025 callout that opens the essay — Metz’s “grammar of cinema” project compared to early symbolic-AI attempts — is itself a media-environment claim: that frameworks born in one technological moment can persist as ideology long after the conditions that produced them have changed.

That indirectness is precisely why McLuhan keeps reappearing. He gives the site a way to move from local observations about slides, CLIs, conversational AI, or software architecture to broader questions about media history and cultural form, without forcing every essay to declare a theoretical allegiance.