The line “All media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical” is one of McLuhan’s most fascinating and unsettling claims. It draws a direct line between what we create and what we are – suggesting that every medium is not just a tool we use, but a literal outward projection or growth of our minds or bodies.
This idea shifts the way I think about media entirely. The book isn’t just saying that media serve us or enhance our lives. It’s saying that media are us, in an extended, externalized form.
What makes this passage so compelling to me is how it erases the boundary between the self and the technological. We like to think of media as separate from us, as things we can pick up and put down. But McLuhan argues otherwise. If media are extensions of our faculties, then every new medium rewires how those faculties operate. We don’t just use media; we become part of them, and they reshape the boundaries of what it means to be human.
That idea feels especially urgent now, when digital media have become so integrated into our lives that they feel like a part of our bodies. Our phones are practically external brains. Social media amplifies the psychic need for connection.
The line holds my interest because it makes me reflect not just on what media do, but what they are, mirror images of our own bodies and minds, carried into the world and then reflected back at us, often changed in ways we didn’t anticipate or realize.