Introduction: The Mediation of Meaning, or Re‐Mediating McLuhan S. Brent Plate In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves or by any new technology. –Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media Meaning is produced by, in, and through social, political, and economic institutions, cultural and religious forces, technology, education, and human bodily engagement with the physical world. Through these multiple movements and productions, meaning is mediated, which means it comes to individuals encapsulated and put into a format that we are taught to recognize, name, and engage. Meaning is enveloped, arriving like a letter in the post, stamped, addressed, and carried from one location to another, sealed by sender, opened by receiver. Just as the letter will not be delivered without proper postage and adequate address, meaning never appears apart from its existence as a particular embodied form. Meaning does not exist apart from its mediation. The implication is that the medium, as McLuhan hyperbolically puts it, is the message. The metaphorical envelope is not a carrier that simply protects the integrity and insures the shipment of its lettered contents as it travels from town to town. Rather, the means of transport changes the nature of the contents. A written letter is not the same as a phone call or an email, and even if the same words are communicated, they will take on different meanings depending on their media. This is now a commonplace assertion for the many who have thought twice about it, but the constantly evolving nature of technology provokes us again and again to return to the implications of media on the human meaning‐making process. To think through the ways meaning is mediated is a challenge to older hermeneutic, iconographic, and semiotic frameworks that typically imagined meaning as a nut in a shell: the shell is broken open, discarded, and the nut is set free by the hermeneutical nutcracker. This outmoded model believed it could separate the outside from the inside, visible from invisible, surface from depth, with privilege given to the latter terms, the true location of meaning. But there is no neat inside–outside distinction, no invisible (spiritual, mental) meaning within that can be easily extracted/exegeted by agents from without. “Depth,” as Erling Hope states in his contribution here, “has become cliché. This does not mean that it is false, only that we need to renew our thinking about depth.” McLuhan’s tidy slogan, “the medium is the message,” is often repeated, though it is key to see the context of his 1964 phrasing, and specifically to understand that for McLuhan a medium is primarily defined here as an “extension of ourselves.” For example, the telephone enables “far‐hearing,” the television “far‐seeing,” and later the Internet would enable a “virtual community.” New developments in media allow humans to do things they were already doing—hearing, seeing, engaging others—but now to do them differently, in other places, times, ways, and with other sets of people. The “new scale” that is introduced by new media technologies rearranges the world: space contracts, time expands, sense organs are intensified, physical labor is eased, institutional structures and ritual practices are transformed. These are not secondary appendages that can be taken on and off willy‐nilly while the core remains unchanged. Once the technological prosthesis of a new medium is in place, everything is changed and there is no going back. Within these human extensions, the message and the medium, the person and prosthesis, the inside and outside are but points along a continuum. In sum, the very nature of our being is altered. Contemporary theorist Samuel Weber, taking McLuhanesque thought through a discourse via Kierkegaard, suggests, “Like all technology, the development of the electronic media follows the ambivalent law, or graphics, of prosthetic supplementarity: an ‘extension’ of human...