Are We Living the McLuhan Myth or Reality?

“Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes” (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967).

What would McLuhan think of us now? That is the question that I have been wrestling with since the inception of this issue. Our world does not look like the one that McLuhan imagined. In many ways, I’m not sure he could have anticipated where we would be—both in our technological advances and in our sense of what it means to be human.

When we were thinking of the television as the medium of choice, it was less about the interactivity and more about the passive user, and the shift that was occurring in our living rooms. Social media changed the way in which we engage. Our smartphones have added yet another layer, altering how we see one another and how we speak to one another… or whether we do at all. Is this a McLuhan world?  The articles in this issue take on this very point and stretch our imaginations and thinking as to who we are, what we have become, and what we need to do.  I wonder how McLuhan would view us… as a Jesuit, as a researcher, as a teacher, and a human.   Did we sidestep too far?  Are we at risk of losing ourselves to a space and time we cannot reclaim? Might the intentionality of our choices determine whether the future we are shaping remains viable?

At the writing of this editorial, a company by the name of Anthropic released a new and faster AI called Claude Mythos.For all the good it promises, it also carries significant potential for harm. This new AI has grown exponentially and is capable of doing its own coding. This poses a significant change in the way in which we engage with AI and what it can do to us.

The good news is that Anthropic discovered in the process of developing Claude Mythos that the A.I. could not only write software code more easily and with greater complexity than any model currently available, but as a byproduct of that capability, it could also find vulnerabilities in virtually all of the world’s most popular software systems more easily than before. The bad news is that if this tool falls into the hands of bad actors, they could hack pretty much every major software system in the world, including all those made by the companies in the consortium (Friedman, 2026)

In particular, this new AI could in fact break encryption. While this shift is seismic in nature, it also reflects how profoundly our technologies are reshaping us. Google, it seems, has created something similar and just as worrisome. With the AI moving this quickly, there will be issues that are unknown and unprocessed.  Richard Clarke, the former Cybersecurity Czar, calls this change of quantum technologies the next Y2K although updated to Y2Q, with the Q standing for Quantum. His point being that all technology companies and all global leaders will need to make some decisions to stay ahead of the world we are living in. For us to get there, it will require a truly collaborative society –one that is working toward a common goal. Is this what McLuhan meant when he suggested we are living mythically?

The medium, or process, of our time—electric technology—is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and reevaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing –you, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government, your relation to “the others.” And, their changing dramatically (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967).

Everything in our world is changing and it is happening in real time. This sense of constant evolution has shaped this journal issue. Some of the ideas presented are within this scope, some exist in a dimension of the authors’ ecosystems, and still others challenge our thinking of McLuhan in the realm of new directions and theories. As such, the ideas presented will provoke questions and offer insights. What would McLuhan think?

References

Friedman, T. (2026, April 7). Anthropic’s Restraint Is a Terrifying Warning Sign. The New York Times. Retrieved: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/opinion/anthropic-ai-claude-mythos.html.

McLuhan, M. and Fiore, Q. (1967). The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects.