Marshall McLuhan and the Age of the LLM: The Medium is the Prompt
By outsourcing the labor of synthesis, drafting, and dialectical reasoning to an external electronic oracle, we are rewriting our internal cognitive architecture. The spreadsheet turned the economy into a quantitative model; the LLM is turning culture itself into an automated, editable simulation.
The Conversational Oracle: A Tetrad Analysis of Artificial Intelligence
By restructuring the primary human interface into a conversational dialogue, AI has fundamentally altered the grammar of knowledge acquisition. Humans no longer navigate static databases; they consult an omnipresent, animistic interlocutor for interpretation, foresight, and meaning. This secondary computational orality satisfies a deep-seated human desire for unmediated guidance, yet it introduces a profound structural vulnerability. The oracle we converse with is inherently a “black box,” masking hyper-complex statistical probabilities as authoritative truth.
McLuhan’s Media Tetrad Applied to Digital Spreadsheet Logic and the Introduction of AI
Unlike approaches that focus only on the intended uses of technology, the tetrad examines how media reshape human perception, social organization, and power relations through four interconnected questions.
Digital Spreadsheets as Remediated Technologies
The digital spreadsheet was designed as an electronic document in which data was arranged in the rows and columns of a matrix and could be manipulated and used in calculations. It combined listing, tabling, and other formulaic calculations to create a new imaginative technology that transformed modern finance and the management of organizations – large, and especially the small.
Origins of the “Information Economy”
This blog post discusses an intellectual period when thinkers were first trying to understand the economic importance of information and communication technologies, whose full impact was not yet apparent.
I then connect this theme to my own doctoral dissertation, which focused on electronic money and dystopias. The post argues that money is a fundamental weak point—the “Achilles heel”—for free-market economic theories because it’s a concept that economists find inconvenient to model.
HOW IT CAME TO RULE THE WORLD, 0.1
McLuhan reworded Churchill’s concern in the 1960s with a more topical “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
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About Me
Professor (full) at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Research Professor for Stony Brook University. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, digital economics, and global political economy
You can reach me at:
anthony.pennings@gmail.com
apennings70@gmail.com
anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
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