McLuhan confronted information technological change in his day by insisting on the pervasiveness of media in “alphabetic cultures” (1964, 98) and their making of human cultural enterprises so opaque to self-reflection. His argument was simply that pervasive media environments remain undetected by us: we immerse in them and they in us. As I am now typing my argument on this computer, I can, to be sure, try to perceive my condition objectively, find myself being inevitably caught by the constitutively fragmentary and linear procedure that must follow in order for me to reproduce my thought via the keyboard on to the screen and then on to a file, which then is saved in a database that I can detach from the far-reaching environment of my computer and carry this whole entirety anywhere I want, print it, post it, share it etc. But it demands too much information processing to stay alert on two fronts for long periods of time: i.e. being aware of your condition as a technologically extended environment, while trying to formulate, preferably, a logically sound argument. My explaining this is naturally a conscious observation produced by my knowledge of theoretical hypotheses (McLuhan’s at this instance); meaning that we do not live our lives analyzing the actions we are performing. This goes to show the point McLuhan makes (ibid. 59) that media are not “make aware technologies” but “make happen technologies”. This is also the gist of the point made by Heidegger (1978) on the phenomenology of technology as instruments; namely, our attention when using a hammer, for example, is not focused on the hammer but rather its effect. This is the formal nature of all mechanical instruments. However, it is only as the sense of the present and place are dislocated and temporal and spatial dimensions are rendered practically void by electricity that media begin to wane as a means and envelop us as environments.
