Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Every new medium transforms society not through its content but through how it reorganises relationships, time and perception. The telegraph matters not for what it carries but because it compresses distance. Television matters not for what it broadcasts but because it rearranges attention. Applied to AI: what matters is not what task it solves, but how it transforms the organisational environment that adopts it. See also The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), where McLuhan traces how the printing press remade society — decentralising access to knowledge and compressing the distance between author and reader.