What does the Internet make of us?

Nearly all the people in this photo are using a mobile phone. These people are not the same as they were before those devices extended their minds and bodies in the digital world no less than they do in this subway car.

“We shape our tools and then our tools shape us,” wrote Father John Culkin, SJ, a Professor of Communication at Fordham and a colleague of Marshall McLuhan, whose magnum opus was Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man.

So: who — or what — are we, now that we are extended by, say, our phones?

Explained McLuhan, “All media are extensions of some human faculty — psychic or…