McLuhan Meets Convergence Culture: Towards a New Multimodal Discourse

Abstract

Drawing principally on public performances in lectures, interviews, and staged presentations, rather than on published texts, this paper discusses McLuhan’s still overlooked contribution to media studies, including a conceptualization of multimodality that defies the logics of literacy, and refutes and refuses its barriers and boundaries. Seen here as a road not taken, McLuhan’s understanding of media, in the form of a transitional theory of media convergence, was an opportunity lost to understand, and to intentionally cultivate, our experience of multimodality, not as a media multiplication, addition, or enhancement, but with the proto-acoustic ‘all-at-once-ness’ of multisensorial convergence. The cost of that lost opportunity for media studies, we argue, has been a conception of multimodality in particular, and media convergence in general, as a ‘multiplication’ driven principally by the characters, capabilities, and economies of digital technologies, not the still vastly untapped sensory and cognitive capabilities of human beings.