Back in the sixties, Marshall McLuhan wrote a once-famous book called “The Medium is the Message” that had an interesting theme to it that could be generally summed up with this quote:
In other words, it’s not just the information you hear, but the way you receive it that shapes the way you think.
At first glance, that might not make much sense.
But consider the attention span you needed to listen to the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, which started with a 60-minute speech, followed by a 90-minute response, and ended with the original speaker getting a 30-minute rebuttal, versus the attention spans of people who get their political information through TikTok.
When newspapers first came out in the 1600s, it sometimes took 6 months to a year to hear news from the other side of the world, while today you can almost watch it happen. Think about your sense of how fast-paced and quickly changing the world is depending on which of those ways you’re getting your information.
The first televised d…
