skopia
Public opinion has a history, and Habermas locates its birth in the coffeehouses, salons, and newspapers where private men first argued about power. Advertising and mass media turned that argument back into spectacle.
Orwell feared censors, Postman writes, but Huxley feared an audience too amused to care. Television has turned news and politics into show business, and every argument about screens since has borrowed his terms.
The medium is the message, McLuhan wrote in 1964: a technology reshapes perception regardless of what it carries. Everyone arguing about what screens do to us is working inside the frame he built.
Mistaken for a famous novelist with the same surname, a nature columnist who writes about questing voles is shipped off to cover an African war. Reporters still quote Waugh's newsroom to each other.
Working with the designer Quentin Fiore, McLuhan turned media theory into a paperback collage of aphorisms and pages printed backwards. Every technology remakes your senses before you notice what it carries.