How Media Secretly Changes Your Mind
And why one crazy philosopher saw it coming 50 years ago
Hi there,
We keep ranting about how social media is melting our minds- and then proceed to watch those dogshit reels 27 hours/day.
But what if the content isn’t the real villain?
What if the real damage is being done by the medium itself — the silent architecture behind the message?
That’s exactly what the book Understanding Media: Extensions of Man is all about.
Written by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, this book was WAY ahead of its time.
But it’s an extremely difficult read, and if I said I understood it fully, I’d be fooling you as violently as the central bankers who give each other fist-bumps, saying that they’ve brought down inflation to 2%.
Nevertheless, there’s no better way to test your understanding than attempting to write down & communicate what you’ve learned- and that’s why we’re here today.
So let’s dive right in and evaluate media from a philosophical perspective.
Prepare your bodies. A bunch of mindblows are coming your way.
The medium is the message
This is the most famous McLuhan idea: these 5 words capture a very deep philosophy that I’ve been thinking about for a long time, long before I read his work.
We obsess over content- the viral reel, the shocking tweet, the ChatGPT response- but rarely question the medium carrying it.
McLuhan flips that focus entirely: it’s the medium itself that matters more than the message.
Because every medium silently rewires how we perceive, think, and behave.
Instagram, for example, wasn’t always brain poison. Its pre-Reel era encouraged aesthetic curation — a feed of idealised photos, carefully composed. But the short-video format radically altered its message: Get attention in 2 seconds. Don’t reflect, just scroll. Chase dopamine. Get addicted. Repeat.
What’s the message of the medium that is AI?
It promises instant knowledge. Answers to any question, any time, with minimal effort. But the real shift is psychological: it conditions us to expect instant resolution, to outsource thought, to reject ambiguity.
If this trend continues, we may not just lose patience — we may lose the capacity for deep thinking altogether.
That’s what media does: it doesn’t just deliver information. It shapes the kind of minds we become.
Let’s turn to an older technology to understand how a new medium radically changed us.
The impact of print
One of McLuhan’s most mind-blowing claims was that print didn’t just help us communicate better — it rewired our brains, and in doing so, helped create the modern world: nationalism, capitalism, bureaucracy, even the assembly line.
Before the written word became common, most human societies were oral cultures. Ideas were passed through speech, song, and performance: meaning was fluid and collective. But the printed page changed all that.
Reading is inherently linear: one word after another, left to right, page by page. That structure— sequential, uniform, and logical— encouraged a new way of thinking. It trained our minds to prefer clarity, order, and standardization.
Once thoughts could be frozen into uniform blocks of text and duplicated endlessly, new things became possible: mass education, standardized instructions, bureaucratic orders. Ideas could now be shared without distortion, forming the basis of mass coordination.
This mental shift birthed the factory floor — a space governed by repeatable processes and mechanical precision. It enabled modern armies with command hierarchies and structured drills.
It enabled capitalism, with ledgers, invoices, and double-entry bookkeeping.
And it enabled nationalism, as millions began reading the same newspapers in the same language and imagining themselves as part of a single, coherent “nation.”
But something was lost in this leap. By squeezing complex realities into linear formats, we dulled the texture of human thought. Nuance, ambiguity, myth — all the messy richness of oral cultures — got flattened to fit the medium.
Print made the world legible. But it also made it mechanical. And once we got the technology of numeracy, we reduced the world to quantities and data points to be manipulated. We learned to treat forests as "x tonnes of timber,” people as “resources,” and nature as something to quantify and control.
McLuhan’s point isn’t to idealize the past — it’s to show us that the medium isn’t neutral. It changes the very way we experience the world.
Auto amputation
Every technology is an extension of us.
A car extends your legs. A telescope extends your eyes. A gun extends your fists.
But here’s the twist: what technology extends, it also amputates.
Cars make us faster — but kill our capacity (and willingness) to walk. Calculators help us add, but dull our number sense. Google, and now AI, give us answers — but weaken our ability to remember, reason, or reflect.
This is McLuhan’s idea of auto-amputation: when we overextend a faculty through tech, the original muscle atrophies.
The lesson isn’t to become a Luddite and go destroy some local data centres with our hand axes. It’s about noticing the hidden trade-offs inherent in new technology.
As we adopt smarter tools, we risk becoming dumber users — unless we learn to preserve the faculties that matter.
McLuhan wasn’t just writing about television in the 60s. He was building a toolkit to decode every wave of media that followed — from social networks to AI interfaces.
And while we can’t stop the march of technology, we can learn to see its hidden footprints before they reshape us.
This piece just scratches the surface. There’s a goldmine of other McLuhan ideas — hot vs cold media, sense ratios, the law of reversal — that I’d love to unpack.
If this blew your mind even a little, drop a comment or reply, and I’ll write a follow-up. Let’s dig deeper together.
Thanks for tuning in! If you enjoyed this, you’ll also love:
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Thank you for sharing this! Looking forward to your follow up posts exploring this some more.