Why McLuhan Matters I: Media as Human Extensions and AI
Marshall McLuhan's ideas were too advanced for the TV age. In the era of social media and AI, they have become indispensable.
McLuhan’s analytical approach is particularly relevant as we move to the next medium that will likely change everything: AI. So, I have selected five of his ideas to help make sense of digital media and the emerging AI. An excerpt from an essay in the new Canadian journal “2067”; read the full essay here.
I. Media as Human Extensions
McLuhan used “media” broadly, to include any tools, technologies, or interfaces that mediate our interactions with environments. According to him, “All media are extensions of some human faculty — psychic or physical.”[1] He even put it in the title of his major work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
The idea was not new. Many thinkers realized that technology enhances human capacities, enabling us to reach further and faster than the body alone allows. Sigmund Freud wrote in his 1930 book Civilization and Its Discontents: “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.” McLuhan took this insight to the next level, turning it into the central concept for understanding media.
Some extensions are obvious: a hammer extends the fist, and a knife extends the teeth and nails. This means they enhance the functions of these organs, making humans “prosthetic gods” compared to animals. The same applies to cognitive faculties: writing is the extension of memory.
Other extensions require some imagination and abstract thinking. The machine gun extends the teeth and nails too, way beyond what a knife can do. Clothing extends the skin, but so does the fence, which shields humans from dangerous surroundings, just as the skin protects the body. And so do city walls and the city itself: they extend and thicken our skin, serving as extra layers between us and outside dangers.
Of course, this is not the only thing the city does, but this lens opens a new way to see how technologies work. Writing extends memory into an external device, but so do computers, the internet, and now AI. We keep most of our memory outside ourselves, which tremendously enhances our cognitive powers, completing the transformation into “prosthetic gods.”
Some abstract examples of extensions made by McLuhan himself sounded poetic in his time, but in the digital era they read like design descriptions. For example: “Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.”[2] This is basically the core principle of the large language model (LLM), described sixty years before ChatGPT.
Grasping the concept of extension, you can’t help but apply it to different technologies and come up with strikingly McLuhanesque conclusions. Try it. For example, a rocket ship is obviously the ultimate extension of the foot, and the nuke is the ultimate extension of the fist. Is AI the ultimate extension of humankind? (The answer is “yes.”)
This is an excerpt from an essay in a new Canadian journal, “2067,” on applied McLuhan in the AI era, covering:
II. The Global Extension of the Central Nervous System and AI
III. Digital Tribalism in the Global Village
IV. Digital Overload, Numbness, and Amputation and AI
V. Surviving the Digital Maelstrom
See other books by Andrey Mir:
NEW! The Technological Imperative: Why We Develop Our Media. Essays on Human Agency and AI (2026)
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
