>>With ubiquitous cell phones and digital records, it's pretty easy to determine whether something happened or didn't.
>>I find it weird how people today tend to fixate more on what people - "the media" - say about the fact than the fact itself.
>>Way back in the sixties, before many of you could spell "byte" this man foretold the coming of this fixation with the medium, rather than with the facts:

I find McLuhan very heavy going (even more than the soliloquy consuming much of Atlas Shrugged) because he seems to delight in redefining words. Jargon is supposed to add clarity; his detracts unless you're careful to engage his special meanings. IMHO. So: he painstakingly defines "message" as structural change in human affairs brought about by innovation. He goes to considerable lengths to distinguish this from content (or "fact") that he described as a juicy piece of meat to distract the watchdog of the mind (sic), preferring to view message as a change in interpersonal dynamics. In his shoes I might have come up with jargon that doesn't involve such a (literally) unpopular meaning, but whatever. His "media" doesn't mean CNN or Fox, either: his medium is an extensions of humanity or capability, with hammer and language given as examples at the very beginning of his "Understanding Media" prose.

His prediction was that we would look backward and perceive unintended consequences reducing human and civil rights. As you say, certainly that has come to pass if you consider that current division, incivility and unrest results from insidious (sic) changes in interpersonal dynamics brought about by- what? As an aside, can you remind me who it was who wrote that throughout history, the sign of collapsing civilization is incivility?

Personally I think Orwell is much more enjoyable and accessible, but impressed that you waded through McLuhan's turgid prose.