In advance of his new book, Nick Carr is rerunning stuff from his old blog.

The smartphone is what you get when the architecture of media collapses. It’s a black hole full of light: information supercompressed but radiant. In its singularity, it might be described as the first postmedia medium. Its circuitry dissolves difference, renders all content equal and equally disposable. Media becomes medium.

Dense-packed with information, the smartphone is, in McLuhan’s terms, a hot medium, maybe the hottest imaginable. It invades the sensorium with an absolute imperialist zeal. Flooding the visual and often the auditory and even tactile senses, it allows no signal but its own. To look into the screen of a smartphone is to be lost to the world. The gadget becomes an extension of the user but, more important, the user becomes an extension of the gadget.

It’s reminding me that, while I wasn’t ready to hear him at the time, he was way ahead of most of us on tech critique, and more particularly on the retrieval of McLuhan’s ideas in a substantial rather than superficial modality.