McLuhan's borrowed word for the environment produced by audience research — the "ghosts and vampires" that possess a population that cannot see what is possessing it. It matters to the series because it appears at both ends of his writing life: on page 47 of The Mechanical Bride in the late 1940s and again in the January 1980 Maclean's essay that is the last thing he published. Start with dialogue 73, where the two ends are put side by side.
Across the dialogues
Promoted from a stray word into the session's organising bracket — the same term found at both ends of McLuhan's writing life, and then redefined from a possessing ghost into an environment that withdraws in order to work
The question that turns a single word into a bracket on the whole career — the term is not late McLuhan but present in the first book, thirty years before the essay Bob is reading.
"By the way, doesn't he use Pollstergeist in Mechanical Bride?"
The correction that keeps the term from going occult — the possessing agent is not a spirit but the medium itself, which is why the figure can be cashed out as advertising and audience research rather than left as a metaphor.
"the Pollstergeist are ghosts and vampires that possess us, but... It's actually the environment."
The operational definition — the Pollstergeist is the research apparatus, not the advertising that follows from it, so the haunting is the act of measuring a public that does not know it is being measured.
"the Pollstergeist is the probing of the audience to find out what the trends are, what's the new phases."
The 1940s occurrence read aloud — McLuhan reaches for the word to explain the relief that greeted Truman's win over the pollsters, making the Pollstergeist a thing people were already anxious about before anyone could name it.
"this spontaneous outburst of joy suggests that there was a very widespread and suppressed anxiety about the human effects of the Pollstergeist operations."
Cameron guesses Bob's unfinished thought before Bob can reconstruct it — that the Pollstergeist's disappearance is not its defeat but the condition of its power.
"I think you're going to say that the Pollstergeist had to disappear in order to become more powerful."
The term's final turn in this session — possession migrates off human beings and onto the machines themselves, which is what leaves the tech body extending itself with no one inside it.
"it stopped possessing people, and it just started possessing its other machines, possessing the machinic"
Connections
McLuhan's word for the audience-research environment, used on page 47 of his first book and again in his last year.
Bob reads the Pollstergeist's withdrawal from people into machines as the move that produces the Android meme phase.