A mother sits in a Korean coffee shop. Phone in one hand, mug in the other. Her infant is in a high chair beside her, a bottle held in one tiny hand, eyes fixed on an iPad propped on the table.
Two screens. Two people. No one looking at anyone.
The medium is the massage
It’s a common sight in this part of the world, though on this one day, the scene connected with what I’m experiencing in my university classes. That is, how mobile devices are impacting young people. Turns out, it’s might be than a strain on the eyes.
Marshall McLuhan offers one lens through which to view it. The late, great professor from another era, were he around today, might be able to help us connect the dots that link technology, society, and change. That was his specialty.
He was an original thinker who left us with a few insightful “isms,” like “the medium is the message,“ and perhaps more impactful, the idea that technology is never neutral. It changes us.
McLuhan’s words are still relevant. In the 1970s, companies paid him rather handsomely to talk about the future of technology, society, and business. For example, he helped IBM reframe its entire business model. McLuhan argued that IBM wasn’t merely in the machine business, but rather in the information business, a remarkable observation at a time when IBM was the leader in mainframe technology and electronic systems.
His trick wasn’t prediction. It was observation. The best way to see the future, he said, is to talk about what has already happened.
I think about McLuhan in that coffee shop. Two screens. Two people. No one looking at anyone. He wouldn’t have seen a mother and child. He would have seen the future: already arrived, already ordinary, already invisible to everyone inside it.
If I dare borrow McLuhan’s method, I might predict that infant’s future. It’s possible she’ll never read a book in her life. How do I know? It’s already happening.
I teach at a university in Korea. I’m an English professor. Some students tell me they’ve never read an English book in their life. Others admit, sheepishly, they’ve never read a book at all. Twelve years of public school, a couple more at university, and that’s the outcome.
This isn’t a judgment. It’s an observation. The same one McLuhan might have made. The future isn’t coming; it’s already here. I’m looking at it in a coffee shop on a Thursday morning. I’m looking at it in my classroom on a Monday afternoon.
The device is the message
McLuhan would have looked at that infant and seen something the mother didn’t. Not the cartoon, but the device.
His famous line, the medium is the message, wasn’t a slogan. It was an observation that the content is secondary. The medium itself does the teaching. What does the iPad teach before any app even opens?
Instant response. Tap and something happens. Swipe and the world changes. Boredom is a problem to be solved immediately. Attention is something you give to a glowing rectangle. Difficulty is a signal to switch.
The cartoon is old media: moving pictures, sound, story. That’s what the parent sees. That’s what she’d defend if you asked. It’s educational. It’s Korean. It’s age-appropriate. But the cartoon isn’t the message. The iPad is the message. And the message is: this is how attention works. This is the posture. This is the relationship between you and the world.
McLuhan called content “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” We debate the content (screen time limits, educational apps, age-appropriate programming) while the medium does its work underneath.
That infant isn’t learning from the iPad. She’s learning that the iPad is where engagement lives. Before she can speak, she’s being trained in a posture toward reality. By the time she reaches my classroom, the training is complete.
Books will feel broken to her. They don’t respond to touch. They don’t reward you for showing up. They asks you to do the work and offer nothing but the quiet payoff of having thought.
That’s not a failure of will. It’s a trained incapacity. The medium shaped the expectation before the alternative ever arrived.
Reading isn’t consumption. It’s co-creation. Every sentence, you’re building meaning alongside the writer. Every paragraph, you’re holding ideas in tension, waiting for resolution. Every page, you’re thinking. The book doesn’t deliver the thought. You need to produce it.
Writing is thinking
Writing is the same process made visible. You don’t write down what you already know. You discover what you think by trying to say it. The sentence you didn’t know was in you arrives because you wrote the one before it.
I teach writing. Not grammar correctness, though that matters. Not prompt engineering, though that’s what some think writing instruction has become. I teach writing as thinking. The 6+1 Traits: Ideas, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, Conventions, and Presentation. They develop through practice, through difficulty, and through staying with the work when it resists.
This is a declining art. Not because students are lazy, but because the medium got there first.
The device teaches input, not construction. Reaction, not reflection. Scanning, not reading. Prompting, not thinking. And now, writing instruction has collapsed into two hollow modes: Grammar correctness (which the machine can check) and Prompt engineering (where the machine does the writing and you just steer). Both skip the thing that matters: the struggle where thinking happens.
The student who prompts an LLM gets an output, but they don’t get the thought. The thought only emerges in the friction between what you meant to say and what you actually wrote. That gap is where learning lives. AI closes the gap. That’s presented as efficiency, but it’s actually amputation.
Every new medium extends us and amputates us. McLuhan saw this. The wheel extends the foot but amputates the walk. The book extends memory but amputates oral recall. The smartphone extends access, but what does it amputate?
Answer: the capacity to stay with difficulty long enough to think.
That infant in the coffee shop isn’t losing something. She’s never developing it in the first place. The tolerance for boredom. The ability to stay with a single thing. The patience that precedes understanding.
And here’s where it gets uncomfortable: there’s a class element to this.
Who will still read books? Kids whose parents limit devices, create rituals around reading, and send them to schools that still assign novels and wait for the discomfort to pass. Kids with access to adults who model reading. Kids in environments where sustained attention is cultivated, not interrupted.
In other words: class.
The working-class kid gets the iPad as a babysitter. The professional-class kid gets the iPad too, but also the curated bookshelf, the bedtime reading, and the parents who can afford the social and emotional capital to say “no.”
Tech companies sell democratized access, but what they’ve actually created is a new literacy divide. The old divide was who had access to books. The new divide is who can resist the screen long enough to read one.
The institutions have acquiesced. Schools assign less. Universities expect even less. The path of least resistance is to meet students where they are, which means meeting them in the medium that already shaped them. The institution that should hold the line instead follows the slope downward.
We’re having the wrong argument. Screen time, content filters, educational apps: all of it assumes the content is the issue. McLuhan would say: you’re watching the juicy meat. The burglar is already inside.
I look at that mother and infant in the coffee shop. I look at my students on Monday afternoon. I think about the questions they don’t know how to ask because the capacity to ask them was never developed, because the medium foreclosed it before they ever arrived.
They don’t even know what questions to ask. And that might be the point.