Marshall McLuhan’s famous claim that the medium is the message has shaped the way we interpret everything from television to the internet. His point wasn’t about slogans, it was about cognition. While a book encourages private, linear reasoning, television dissolves that "linearity" into a more emotional, mosaic style of perception. And in an "old school" sense, radio, film, and newsprint each reorient the mind in their own way. The medium always leaves its fingerprints on thought.

However, there’s a boundary to McLuhan’s world. The media he studied were cognitively inert. They shaped perception, but they didn’t join the thinking. A book didn’t anticipate your next idea. Television didn’t counter your assumptions. Even early digital tools such as email, search engines and social networks altered our habits without participating in the reasoning behind them. They created the environment in which thinking occurred, but they didn’t take part.

That boundary has now........

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