My wandering down into Web Rabbit Holes of interest happend much more frequently than the rate of blog posts. It’s where I find the most sanity in the pile of poop much (but not all) of the web is piled with.
It started with a Mastodon post by Bonni Stachowiak referencing her own post on the metaphor of hammers and the hammering question of AI as “tool”
I reflect on a recent post by @mahabali and really dig deep into the hammer metaphor. Plus a song about hammers and the flowers Dave and I planted in the front yard, recently.
Hammering My Way into AI-Related Metaphors and a Familiar Song: https://teachinginhighered.com/2026/06/07/hammering-my-way-into-ai-related-metaphors/
And to trace the tunnel back, Bonni references the post by Maha Bali on Must-Read: AI is Not a Tool, It’s a Medium-Institution (Discover Abi Awomosu) itself referencing yet one link back another post critically going after the “AI is just a Tool” spiel. Maha digs into the relationship with a tool when we use it, not just admire it on a shelf, quoteing from Abu Awomosu’s article:
That framing [of AI as a tool] is not just dismissive — it is the ceiling of what tool literacy can imagine. A tool is discrete. You pick it up, put it down, its function is fixed. A hammer drives nails. You are the agent. The institution that holds you both remains unchanged.
….You don’t pick it up and put it down. You inhabit it, or it inhabits you.
https://abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-say-ai-is-the-next-industrial
It all resonates for sure, but what tripped me off was the hammer metaphor.
Immediately I went to an association with what I remember being described by or attributed to Marshal McLuhan’s ideas of tools as extensions of humans, about when we hold a hammer in our hand, it is a new tool, not just a hammer, not just a hand, but a “hammerhand.”
That’s one of those associations that aew buried deeply, like it just takes a reference to “hammer as a tool” and it rises up like a shark eager for a …. well not that metaphor.
So I hit the web search, which again I find weird for how broken and useless it gets pitched, and yet somehow it works for me, (with Google in My Hand it is a powerful GoogleHand?) I looked for mcluhan hammer hand. The link I dug down to was below the top layer whioch indeed is mostly not what I want to see but what the Pusher pushes.
There I came to a 2011 blog post (remember blogs? and people keeping their knowledge online) Painfully Coming to Grips with ‘The Medium is the Message’. I admit I skimmed down past the title of the post and even the author nickname because I was digging down into something that felt right. It’s another post, but I cannot quantify fully that sensation on a search that I have found the golden thread to pull out of the web sweater.
I hit exactly what I sought, and even more, an important relevant message from 2011, forgotten in the glittery rush of AI in a bottle
One of the ways McLuhan tries to make this clear is through the concept of “extension”. He explains that media is not just a tool, it becomes a part of us – an extension of what we can do. I had a breakthrough on this when I listened to the podcast conversation between Gardner Campbell and Alan Levine for the McLuhan session of a past NMFS series, on the heels of our Wednesday session (I wish I’d listened to it before!). Gardner used this perfectly simple and powerful example to explain what McLuhan means by “tools as extensions of ourselves”. Here goes…
“If you pick up a hammer, and hold it in your hand, what do you have?” Gardner asks. Our answers immediately jump to capabilities (“you can build a house” or “now you need a nail”). But Gardner urges us to, instead, think in terms of the most basic, the most obvious thing. You have a hammer in your hand. Simple. And the, he says, McLuhan goes further. What McLuhan would say is that you don’t have a hammer in your hand, what you now have is a “hammerhand”. You’ve changed the hammer. And you’ve changed your hand. A new union, that neither one was before you picked up the hammer.
Aha. The penny dropped for me. And my next immediate thought was how very wrong I’ve been in a key element of my thinking about new media technology (this is the painful, blowhard part). In my work, I spend a lot of time with teachers and students, talking with them (coaching them) about the use of new media as it’s applied to teaching and learning. What I regularly say, in an attempt to soothe and reassure them, is that all of these wonderful web tools are just that – they are tools. Not unlike a pencil or a chalkboard or a microscope. What you do with the tool is what makes it worthwhile. What you plan, create, devise is what has meaning. Gawp. Exactly the opposite of what McLuhan is saying.
emphasis added by me from http://Painfully Coming to Grips with ‘The Medium is the Message’
And boom! The tunnel went full circler- of course this was the wisdom of Gardner Campbell in the years of his New Media Faculty Seminars– or his title “Awakening the Digital Imagination: A Networked Faculty Development Seminar”. He lead a series of conversations with his faculty (then at Baylor University) on readings from The New Media Reader (it’s still online, how can you say the web is dead?).
But what Gardner had done is to run and share his seminar structure (you can find it in the wayback machine, well I did)- but it was a distributed seminar, he had other university groups sign up to run their own local versions, and then there was network sharing via RSS, forums, all that old connectivist stuff folks just shrug off in LinkedIn puff posts as “web nostalgia.”
It was real. I actually visited Gardner in 2010 and sat in one of his Baylor seminars. It was real. It reas real good.
But the post also mentions a podcast- yes, because I was then doing stuff with what was once the New Media Consortium, we collaborated on two years of doing a podcast (yeah, podcasts in 2010) where we would discuss the weekly topics, he would share what happened in his Baylor discussions and what we saw more widely in the network.
I found the posts for most of the podcasts yes again in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, including indeed New Media Faculty Seminar: Fall 2010 Week 8 the episode on 2 McLuhan essays in the New Media Reader in which Gardner spells out the Hammer Hand.
The love of the Internet Archive goes deep, as I was able to download from this, and all other episodes the audio for these episodes. When the NMC went out of operation, all of its assets where bought by EDUCAUSE like it was an estate sale, only because they wanted the gold plated Horizon Reports. They chucked or left in a back warehouse a huge web legacy of content, resources, media that I worked on whiole there 2006-2011. I shake a fist at EDUCAUSE for being a lousy caretaker of web history.
So I am doing it myself, I have all the audio I could snag, here is the Week 8 episode with the HammerHand conversation in the eloquent voice of Gardner himself (how quaint a podcast, no intro music, no show promotion and no effing ads, just audio).
And because I just ran a program to create a transcript, here is the segment starting at 12:09
Again, we were thinking more about I think The Medium Is The Message, but the extension idea, we had one fellow in there who’s a film and digital media scholar who had read McLuhan at the beginning of his graduate training and had understood that McLuhan was trying to get to a fuller sense of a kind of theory of media than anybody had, and so it was obviously groping around in lots of ways, but the illustration I brought up was that of the hammer in the hand.
And that’s the one that I tried with my students a few weeks back, and it seems to have stuck. It seems to have been just crazy enough, but just useful enough to keep McLuhan’s thoughts alive as we’ve moved along.
So what I said was, and we were in second life when this was happening, so it was a very interesting context, and I said, “So if you pick up a hammer, what do you have?”
I said, “Give me the absolute bare bones most obvious answer,” and they couldn’t do it at first. They said, “Well, you have a tool, or now you’re going to look for a nail, or you can build a house, or you have the capability to blah, blah, blah,” and I said, “Those are all right answers, but they’re not getting at the most basic reality that McLuhan wants us to start with.”
And after a while, one person just was bold to be as basic as possible, which is very hard to do. It’s very, very difficult to get to the absolute basic most obvious thing and start there.
And I think it was a “she,” she said, “Well, you have a hammer in your hand.”I said, “Right. You pick up a hammer, you have a hammer in your hand.”
Right. That’s the basic level we need to start at, because what McLuhan would say is, “Well, looked at one way, you have a hammer in your hand.”
Looked at through the light of his media philosophy, if you’re truly understanding media, you don’t have a hammer in your hand, you have a hammer hand.
Gardner Campbell explaining the Hammer Hand
When I shared with Gardner, he reminded me of the earlier episode we recorded for week 5- we were actually in Barcelona for some NMC conflab with the UOC (University of Catalonia Online) imagining the future of the “Campus” in a digital era (Hah the horizons were pretty short of what 2026 has). But we did record our podcast literally form the roodtop of the place we were staying, we had all kinds of Abbey Road vibes going. I am surprised that amongst the many photos I took of the trip I have none from the rooftop studio, but I do have the audio.
Well I have dig up from the tunnel for air, and just appreciate all of this being triggered by a mention of hammer as a metaphor.
I still think of it as not just a tool, whether in my hand or not. It’s a tool with my mind.
Featured Image: My “new” hammer, a fun pen I bought on a whim, in my hand. It’s not just a hammer, it’s not just a pen, is it a HammerPenHand? Oh the metaphor os now kicked to the curb. Image soon to be uploaded to flickr where it will be shared of course into the public domain using CC0.
