Looking forward for what’s next!

Extremely interesting analysis. Brilliant, in fact!
What was McLuhan doing? As you suggest, he may have been attempting a synthesis of the newer concepts with the older framework that was familiar to him (the two weren’t incompatible, as he saw it). He was also bringing the au courant terminology into his desired conceptual framework so as to underscore what his and the newer frameworks had in common.

Great work!!

The internet was certainly way different when I was using it as a teenager in 2003-2006—and even *then* I felt like I had missed out on something. MUDs would have been crazy!

Do it for science! 🥽🧪

I’m not considering this as a matter of gender identity in any cut-and-dry sense. Queerness in its modern usage entails a far broader spectrum of traits and is, I think, more amenable to understanding as related to early childhood and teenage development.

You highlight a very important difference between the media, which is that television is basically a disembodied experience for the watcher, while video games are putting the player inside the frame somehow. As Keough points out, mastery of the controller is essential for forgetting its existence and merging with the experience, just as learning to choreograph turn signals and acceleration and breaking and steering and mirror checks and road-sign comprehension into a singular activity (part-to-whole gestalt formation) is essential for a driver merging with their vehicle. Mobile phone games have the simplest interfaces yet, so you see them everywhere that people are killing time. I suspect that immersion isn’t less for video games, but that the level of immersion they give already—a level similar to TV—is already sufficient, and so the VR headset tech and funky controller technology is excessive and unnecessary for the experienced gamers they were marketed to. Since games do need some kind of embodiment, though, the shape and form of that relation is everything. (Remember the hype over “hand-eye coordination” which video game controllers bestowed upon youth, as though that was some kind of particular, generalizable gift? Did all the kids who played Mortal Combat become expert whittlers and puppeteers?)