Future media and technologies – including what happens when virtual reality and augmented reality, for example, are combined with accelerated computational power – could amplify this angelic tendency, says Miroshnichenko, and bring about a new kind of “augmented humanity”. “Now we are about to totally live inside our latest medium. Almost all our activities are already there. Humankind is resettling from biological bodies into the digital body.”How, ultimately, media and technology affect us all – and the degree to which human nature is remoulded and redefined by our ‘tools’ – is open to debate. And that’s McLuhan’s point: “The central purpose of all my work is to convey this message,” he told Playboy magazine. “That by understanding media as they extend man, we gain a measure of control over them.”

“Electronic media cancelled the physical time and space limitation for humans to be present at events. Digital media advanced this new quality of human beings even more, they make time elastic, which is impossible in physical reality. In video games, a player can slow down, stop, reverse, repeat time. Resurrection becomes everyday routine for video game players, who save and restart their digital selves, and for social media users, who can delete and restore their profiles.”