Empire and communication: the media wars of Marshall McLuhan

Abstract

From his first reflections on advertising as a ‘magical institution’ in 1952 to his last writings on ‘The Brain and Media’ in 1978, Marshall McLuhan was reproached for his utopian view of media technologies as the ‘extensions of man’ and for his failure to understand the new, more formidable rhetorical powers of the electric mass media. These criticisms are not entirely unjust. At times McLuhan does seem to view media machines as vehicles of flight into a ‘cosmic harmony’ that ‘transcends space and time’. But for all his ‘delirious tribal optimism’ (Baudrillard), McLuhan also understood that the global village or ‘global theatre’ has become a theatre of war, a staging area for ‘colossal violence’ and ‘maximal conflict’. In order to shed new light on this darker, more radical vision of the mass media set forth by McLuhan, this article explores his decisive – but largely unacknowledged – contribution to radical media studies today, especially to the work of Paul Virilio, Friedrich Kittler and others concerned with the alliance of war, media and information in modern society. After some reflections on McLuhan's ‘mosaic’ approach to the media ecology and his view of media as the extensions of man, I examine three modulations of his most infamous aphorism: the medium is the message; the medium is the massage; and the medium is the mass-age.