The Medium Is Still the Message: How Marshall McLuhan Saw Our Media Crisis Coming

As someone who spent decades in newsrooms, public affairs roles, providing media commentary and serving as chief of staff to the late Boone Pickens, I’ve come to appreciate how prescient Marshall McLuhan truly was.

My first real introduction to McLuhan came in a journalism class at Texas Tech under Harmon Morgan—a no-nonsense professor who didn’t waste time on academic fluff. Morgan made us grapple with McLuhan’s ideas not as abstract theory, but as practical tools for understanding how media actually worked in the real world.

Born in 1911, this Canadian literary critic and media theorist was doing intellectual heavy lifting about communication theory long before most of us understood what was coming.

McLuhan wasn’t just an academic throwing around clever phrases—though “the medium is the message” became his calling card. He was a prophet of the information age who predicted how electronic media would reshape human consciousness and society itself. His concept of the “global village”—where electronic communication would bring all parts of the world together—seemed like science fiction in the 1960s. Today, it’s Tuesday morning on social media.

The man understood something fundamental: the way information is conveyed through a medium is more significant than the content itself. In my years covering politics, business, and culture, I’ve watched this truth play out in ways that would make McLuhan nod knowingly.

Case Study 1: TikTok’s Algorithm as the Ultimate “Medium is the Message”

Here’s where McLuhan’s theories get uncomfortably real. TikTok’s bite-sized videos grab attention quickly, making content consumption fast, but the real story isn’t what’s in those videos—it’s how the platform’s algorithm shapes what we see, think, and ultimately become.

The TikTok algorithm is a sophisticated machine learning system designed to serve users content that they are likely to enjoy. But McLuhan would recognize this as something more sinister: the medium literally becoming the message. The algorithm doesn’t just deliver content; it creates reality.

As a former journalist and as a communications strategist, I’ve watched how TikTok’s vertical video format has forced every other platform to follow suit. The rise of TikTok and Instagram Reels has made short-form vertical videos the new norm. We’re not just consuming different content—we’re rewiring our brains for different attention spans, different narrative structures, different ways of processing information.

The medium has changed us. The message is secondary.

Case Study 2: The Global Village Goes Dark—Social Media Tribalism

McLuhan predicted that electronic media would create a global village, but he also warned about what that might cost us. As media technologies expand and connect people across borders, they change how we experience community, and not always for the better.

Look at how social media has actually functioned during major global events—from elections to pandemics to international conflicts. Instead of creating McLuhan’s unified global village, we’ve seen the rise of what researchers call “context collapse.” Social media would shrink the world and reshape it into a village by moving information instantaneously from any location at any time, but that village has split into warring tribes.

I covered enough political campaigns to see how Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms don’t just report on polarization—they accelerate it. The medium creates echo chambers that feel like global conversation but function like isolated compounds. McLuhan’s global village exists, but it’s more like a collection of gated communities that happen to share the same digital infrastructure.

Case Study 3: The Death of Linear Narrative in News

Here’s something I lived through firsthand: the collapse of traditional journalism’s linear storytelling structure. McLuhan predicted that electronic media would move us away from the linear, sequential thinking encouraged by print culture toward what he called “mosaic” thinking—simultaneous, pattern-based processing.

Watch how news breaks on social media today. There’s no beginning, middle, and end. There’s no careful fact-checking sequence. Instead, we get fragments, updates, corrections, retractions, and viral misinformation all happening simultaneously. The medium—real-time, multi-source digital platforms—has completely changed what “news” means.

As someone who started in print journalism, I can tell you that the medium of newspapers forced a certain kind of thinking: linear, hierarchical, with clear attribution and sourcing. Social media’s medium forces a different kind of thinking entirely. Speed matters more than accuracy. Engagement matters more than truth. The algorithm’s appetite for content shapes what gets covered and how.

Case Study 4: Zoom Culture and the “Extensions of Man”

McLuhan famously described media as “extensions of man”—technologies that extend our capabilities but also reshape our consciousness. The pandemic gave us a perfect laboratory for this theory: Zoom meetings.

New forms of media, like television and the internet, are retribalizing society, shifting the balance of senses back towards a more communal experience. But Zoom did something stranger—it created a simulacrum of presence that changed how we think about space, intimacy, and professional relationships.

Having conducted hundreds of meetings over Zoom during the pandemic, I can tell you that the medium fundamentally altered the content of those conversations. The slight delay changes rhythm. The gallery view changes power dynamics. The ability to mute and unmute changes the nature of interruption and consensus.

We didn’t just move meetings online—we created a new form of human interaction entirely. The medium became the message, and the message was: presence is negotiable, attention is fragmented, and hierarchy flattens in a grid of equal-sized rectangles.

Case Study 5: AI and the Acceleration of McLuhan’s Predictions

This is where things get really interesting from my perspective as someone who’s watched media evolve over decades. Some modern journalists and academics have pointed to algorithms, social media and the internet as great examples of McLuhan’s theory, but AI takes this to another level entirely.

Large language models like ChatGPT aren’t just delivering information—they’re creating it in real-time based on patterns in their training data. The medium (AI) literally becomes the message (whatever the AI generates). There’s no original “content” anymore, just endless recombination of existing patterns.

As someone who’s spent years crafting carefully sourced, fact-checked articles and speeches, watching AI generate convincing text instantly is both fascinating and terrifying. The medium of AI communication is changing what we consider authoritative, what we consider true, and what we consider human.

The McLuhan Warning We Should Have Heeded

Looking back at decades of media evolution, McLuhan’s insights weren’t just academic theory—they were warnings. He understood that new media don’t just deliver content differently; they change consciousness itself.

McLuhan put forward influential media theories such as “Global Village”, “Media is Information,” “Media is an Extension of Human,” but his deeper insight was that we become what our media make us. We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.

From my perch as someone who’s watched journalism evolve from typewriters to TikTok, McLuhan’s greatest contribution wasn’t predicting the future—it was warning us to pay attention to how the medium changes the messenger. We are all extensions of our media now, and most of us don’t even realize it’s happening.

The medium is still the message. We’re just different people than we were when we started reading it.