heralds of the ontological turn

Heralds of the Ontological Turn: Re-reading the Toronto school as The Message of Felt Body Worlds

by Maria Rogg

for #IV. the medium is the message?

Differens Magazine, winter 23/24

When she said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, it was as though she spoke directly to me. I wanted to ask her, “Then, which tools will?”

Minna Salami

Ferments:

  • We are discussing under which faculty our media and communication departments are based. Humanities or the Social Sciences?
  • Does Big Data analysis provide more useful answers than less tech savvy methodologies?
  • My colleague wonders how my phenomenological approach was received. Were there requests for a discursive lens?

These conversational snippets from a PhD-course on classics in media theory resonate positionalities that shape the media and communication discipline since its emergence in the 20th century. Administrative vs. critical research; representation vs. media materiality; and social vs. individual-based approaches indicate the intellectual lineage of a media scholar and continue to provide the constitutive divides through which the discipline develops (Fuchs & Qiu, 2018; Lazarsfeld, 1941). Departing from datafication as a perspective that radically changes our situation  and the premises of the discipline, this essay questions if such dualistic organisation is still suitable for attempts to understand, investigate and explain a mediated world – a world in which media technologies and their communication become agents in relation to essentially everything. It turns to canonic texts of the Toronto School, to explore alternatives. 

According to Eva Illouz (2003) a text becomes canonic when “it offers a radically new set of metaphors for grasping social reality and reorganizing our understanding of how the social world works” (p. 91). Loyal to the desperate call for reorientation embodied by the interrelated crises of extraction, extinction and objectification, I aim for a provocation of such rethinking by mobilising the “paradigmatic disagreement” (ibid.) of Harold A. Innis (1951/2008) and Marshall McLuhan on mediating media as  mere representational powers, by suggesting to re-read ‘The Bias of Communication’ and ‘Understanding Media’ (1964/2001) as early adoptions and media of the ontological turn.

Motivated and discussed along their “language games” (Illouz, 2003,  p. 91) in relation to problematizations of datafication as a dualist analytic which implicates major ethico-political challenges, I argue that Innis’ and McLuhan’s style of writing becomes a way of being, knowing and doing their intellectual proposition that  the medium of communication affects the message. Thereby Innis and McLuhan themselves literally transform into the medium of situated and embodied knowing as the counter message to datafication as a regime of certainty (cf. Lagerkvist, 2022).

Datafication, the abstraction of “everything” including life into data (Mayer Schönberger & Cukier, 2013, p. 93) changes our situation insofar as it operates the mining of our most intimate experiences for the “capitalization of life without limit”  (Couldry & Mejias, 2019). These ‘limitless extractions’ (Couldry & Mejias, 2020) govern inter alia by performing the ideology that calculable reasoning is the only way to explain reality and that data and data-based technology is more accurate, efficient and reliable than human knowledge (van Dijck, 2014). 

This changes who studies media, and how they are approached. For Fuchs and Qui (2018) datafication reaffirms the positivist, empiricist origins of media and communication studies (cf. Gitlin, 1978), by embedding “the rise of big data analytics  and computational social science” (Fuchs & Qiu, 2018, p. 222) as the dominant paradigm in digital media studies. The view that the query of media is now subject to a social scientific hegemony that advances an “absolutism of pure [digital and  quantitative] methodology” is confirmed by Habermas (p. 5, Habermas in ibid.).

On closer inspection however there are trends that complicate this assessment, by reorienting media inquiry towards critical anticipatory and interventionist ends. Applied media studies represents, according to Kirsten Ostherr (2017), an epistemological redirection of “media studies [a]s ideally poised not only to analyse but also to intervene […] new models for understanding humanistic knowledge formation as a  productive field that can be “applied” for solving “real-world” problems […]” (Ostherr,  2017, p. 3).

Media studies and the humanities at large are assigned “a new role of critique that goes beyond the description and interpretation of cultural forms to demonstrate how critical perspectives might change or even improve circumstances in the world through direct intervention” (ibid., p. 8). An example is Splichal’s and Mance’s (2018) map of criticality in empirical and non-empirical communication research which intervenes criticality by configuring a non-positivistic network analysis: 

“Our analysis was focussed on ontological dimensions of “criticality,” which is  taken to mean a future-oriented research perspective aimed at understanding, explaining and transforming dehumanizing and oppressive realities. It should not be seen as an attempt to shift qualitative research toward a positivist  approach but rather an effective tool to help qualitative researchers to figure out what lies within the data” (ibid., p. 402) 

As “technological artefacts are not neutral intermediaries but actively co-shape people’s being in the world: their perceptions and actions, experience and existence” (Verbeek, 2011, p. 8), the quest for intervention rises in neighbouring domains of media and communication studies such as surveillance studies (Gates, 2011), science and technology studies (de La Bellacasa, 2017), and the philosophy of technology (Haraway, 2016; Verbeek, 2011) as well.

What unites these approaches is averting  from the notion of ‘pure information’ (representation), and attending to digital existence: the “point at which data recombine into an identity in the ‘concrete’, ‘corporeal’ and ‘material’ reality” (Ajana, 2010, p. 248). Such existential study of media  (technologies) can be seen as a development closely related to the datafication of the self (cf. ibid.; Lupton 2016). Based on the centrality of the body (cf. Ajana, 2010; Ajana,  2013; Fuchs, 2020; Lagerkvist et al., 2022) and a conceptualization of subjectivity as singular-plural (Nancy, 2000) – unique, yet innately relational –media research on the  self and the social gradually conjoin in questions about being.  

The literature reviewed suggests a growing identification of media studies with ontological questions that disorder the constitutive dualisms and dichotomies of the discipline. The orientation at the relational dimensions of life, the lived experience of becoming-with the world (Haraway, 2016), indicate a heightened interest and urgency in the ethico-political stakes of media as technologies of the self that play a  constructive role for our ways of being, knowing and doing. The affiliation of media  studies with such postdualist academic trends known as the ontological turn (Escobar,  2018, p. xi), is not entirely new to media theory, despite being a fairly recent development. A rather clear line can be drawn to the environmental media materialism of the Toronto School which I will present, complicate and discuss in the following  sections. 

Breaking boundaries 

Media as our situation 

Harold Adams Innis conceptualized media as environments and infrastructures that sustain the lifeworld of ideas (Blondheim, 2003). The writing style of ‘The Bias of  Communication’, and the concepts of time and space bias; knowledge monopoly; and inverted determinism could be regarded as the grammar for comprehending the more  notorious figure of the Toronto School, Marshall McLuhan and his punchline the medium is the message. Innis focused on the nature of knowledge and its role in  society as shaped by the dominant media of its time throughout history. By theorizing mediated time and space bias as a stabilizing, disrupting and recreational force for social change, he introduced the elemental dimension of media. Related to the resilience of a message over space or over time, he assigned certain media, such as oral forms of communication like the pyramids or clay (Innis, 2008, pp. 33, 34), greater efficiency in transporting knowledge over time (time-biased media), while he distinguished other media, particularly written or broadcasted forms of communication, as more successful in delivering knowledge across space (space-biased media). According to Innis, a bias arises, because “[…] the use of one medium of  communication over a long period to some extend determines the character of knowledge […]” (ibid., p. 34).

Oral cultures, e.g., succeed in keeping knowledge alive through maintaining a concrete intergenerational continuity through rituals and  storytelling, which can be observed in many indigenous cultures that have the ’living knowledge’ of how to integrate human and nonhuman activity without causing harm1. The limitations on the durability of oral knowledge bind and bias oral societies to its past, while space-biased societies convey information over long distances but have  short exposure times. Space-biased societies are thus threatened by their  discontinuity in time. In line with McLuhan, Innis worried about the extreme imbalance of time and space-based media in the Western world, which, during that time, tended almost exclusively in the direction of space (Blondheim, 2003, p. 168). It confirmed his hypothesis that the media bias of a society implies a dynamic towards knowledge monopoly, because the dominant medium, in its amplified and perpetuated forms,  entrenches its effects on society and blocks the emergence of alternatives.  

“Media are essentially an apparatus that provides for the interface of mind and matter – a technical resource that sustains the lifeworld of ideas. By achieving a monopoly, a certain communication apparatus may become the sole provider of physical infrastructure for communications, and thus dominate the nature of knowledge and its diffusion” (ibid., p. 170). 

The mental and ideological restrictions implied are illustrated by the  consequences of rationalism as a knowledge paradigm institutionalized through print (McLuhan, 2001) which effectively blocked situated, relational and embodied ways of knowing as feasible alternatives. Constructed upon the division between body and mind as mind and matter (Descartes, 1990), this knowledge monopoly dominates based on the alleged superiority of scripted intelligence – today data – used to  measure, manage and govern through means of abstraction. 

Data complicate things, because they transcend time and space. Data aren’t disposable, but extract our movement as a disposable terrain (Zuboff, 2019). By transporting information across time and space data predict and model the future (Lagerkvist, 2020; ibid.). One way of approaching this would be conceptualizing humanity itself as a technology of measurement, a human machine model based on  universal computation as suggested by the media ontology of Friedrich Kittler (Kittler,  2009; 1999). A related, but more expectant approach which better seizes Innis’s confidence in human agency (Blondheim, 2003) is that of elemental media. In line with  Innis, John Durham Peters (2015) thinks media as environmental, “as part of the  habitat, and not just as semiotic inputs into people’s heads” (p. 5)2. As a “gel for growing culture” media compose “a communication environment in which [they] have  become equipment for living in a more fundamental way [ …].

Today natural facts are media, and cultural facts have elemental imprint: We can see the internet as a means of existence, in some way closer to water, air, earth, fire, and ether, in its basic shaping of environments” (Peters, 2015, pp. 3, 4, 45). Media have become our situation through which we constitute ourselves as relational beings through communication (Lagerkvist, 2022). Accordingly, media scholar Amanda Lagerkvist suggests to reconceive of media as existential media that envelop and ground us, but that also provide our core tools and ethical task of giving gestalt to our coexistential terrains (Lagerkvist, 2017). We have a role to play.

Such conceptualization of media as “the building blocks and the bricks of being” (Lagerkvist, 2022, p. 16) is based on the existentialist communication theory of Karl Jaspers (1956/2013), for whom “[…] humans are relational beings, whose existence, identity, and humanity depend on intersubjective communication (Lagerkvist, 2017, p. 134). As sustainers of our lifeworld, the phenomenological ground of all intersubjective knowledge in lived experience that is arranged relative to perceiving subjects (Husserl, 1936/1970, p.  142) media become “containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what  we are doing possible” (Peters, 2015, p. 17). As our infrastructures and ‘modes of  being’ media encompass existential, ethical and ecological bearings (ibid.) and demands.  

Innis’s embrace of this task can be traced in his idiosyncratic style of research, which I interpret as a tribute to the fact that our knowledge, while being extended due to various media technologies, is still always fragmentary, within limits, and that “the  direction of technology cannot be looked for in technology itself, but must be thought  of in a conscious ethos” (Jaspers in Lagerkvist forthcoming, 46). Thus, I suggest that  it should be regarded as a style of writing towards the ontological turn. Reading ‘The Bias of Communication’ “is a unique experience” (Blondheim, 2003, p. 164) for being an exhibit of situated knowledge, riddled with contradictions, inconsistencies and bothersome closed individual statements which demand from the reader to create her own gestalt in response to it. Its cultivation of inconclusiveness reminds us of “the limits of our aspirations to comprehensive knowledge, to certainty, and to resolution” (Lagerkvist, 2017, p. 6) and proposes to embrace the ontological and existential tensions and irreducibilities which media co-constitute. “The Bias […] inconclusive but intriguing, begs development and extension, as if anticipating its subsequent re-creators” (Blondheim, 2003, p. 163). Innis’s “unique strategy for communicating scholarship” (ibid., p. 162) cultivates communication as the essence of lived  experience, our singular, relational and embodied existence. 

According to Innis, “a bias, if recognised, will generate a counter-bias as a corrective,  in the cause of equilibrium” (Blondheim, 2003, p. 169). That is the ratio of inverted determinism. By intervening this counter-movement to rebalance knowledge monopoly, Innis postulated that individuals and society have the power to shape their environment by rearranging their media ecology (ibid.). While our “Coded Bias” 
(Buolamwini & Gebru, 2018) indicates that today’s inversion might require a  reconceptualization of limits (Lagerkvist, 2022), the quest to attentively observe, problematize and act upon how media shape our life through time and space remains.

Acknowledging the inseparability of ethics, ontology and epistemology when engaging in (scientific) knowledge production, with the world itself, and its human and non human inhabitants (Barad, 2007, p. 90), provides an important step. If, as Peters says, “science is ontologically generative” (2015, pp. 40, 41), a reorientation of science away from an ontology of numbers (Fuchs, 2020; Lagerkvist, 2022) towards a relational ontology, might provide the desperately needed corrective to sustain life lived in and  through elemental media. 

Becoming media 

McLuhan’s methodological choices, I argue, are detailed pointers for such reorientation in media and communication research. They aren’t made explicit, yet they fundamentally embed, operationalize and engage the qualitative nucleus of his  work. The implicit, the disjointed and the resulting sensuous wanderings of the recipient encompass a methodological ratio, which, akin to Innis, make McLuhan’s style of writing a style of research: the non-linearity and inconsistency, the poetic, the ‘arbitrary’ or emergent connections drawn, the humor, the enforced harmony of competing arguments, the stubborn breaching of disciplinary norms and boundaries lead to the exceptional stringency of his theory, the power of his message. Beyond that, and of greater significance for the present text, his work becomes alive. McLuhan’s methodology triggers. It demands a sensuous response that might be best  pinned as the corporeal intellectual state of wakefulness. It is a trade between felt positionality – involvement, imagination, and judgment – and deliberation that I would like to suggest as a directive for a metaphysical critique: a corrective towards the living  body. 

Rather than media themselves, I would argue that the central subject of McLuhan’s medium theory is the body, corresponding to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment theory (1945/2013) which posits that my body is my perspective upon the world as it shapes how I experience and reshape it. Just as Merleau-Ponty, McLuhan departs from the notion that we cannot understand perception in abstraction from its concrete  corporeal condition; a practical, embodied agency that precedes our conscious reflection (ibid., p. xiii). For McLuhan, media are extensions of human senses which introduce, translate and naturalize perceptive patterns that shape human action and thought (McLuhan, 2001).

The phenomenal world is, thus, co-constituted through mediated corporeality. Related to the embodied medium specificity, the body provides a particular point of view, a worldview so to say. By attending to the experiential qualities afforded or amputated by media as means for the social, the bias in McLuhan’s terms concerns translation rather than communication, as the habituation of an extended sense can have a numbing effect that naturalizes alienation. By the  concept of ‘autoamputation’ which turns us into servants of technology, McLuhan  addresses a form of sensuous deskilling that results from outsourcing our experience to ‘hot media’, media that saturate and isolate the senses:  

“The selection of a single sense for intense stimulus […] rallies a response of general numbness […] meaning that while neglecting all the others, humans adopt to their corrupted sense in use. As a consequence of subliminal acceptance and common embrace, humans turn into objects of the stimulating extension, possibly producing a cultural lag” (McLuhan, 2001, p. 45). 

The common embrace of such objectification is favoured by mistaking content to be the media effect, while it in fact serves as a sort of mimicry for the medium effect  to mature. Media are, thus, neither objects nor concepts, but powers that “alter the  sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without resistance” (McLuhan,  2001, p. 19). As “effects involve the total situation, and not a single level of information  movement” (ibid., p. 28) the world and the perceiving subject emerge in and through  media as two poles of one structure. Yet, we navigate through life based on abstractions of experience that dissect, dichotomize and hierarchize our being-in-the world and corrupt our sense for what media and bodies are and do.

To McLuhan, this  disorder is rooted in literacy, as “‘text-based thinking’ meant taking a ‘fixed point of view’ and searching for a fixed ‘truth’; being concerned with linear, logical sequence, emphasizing the mechanical over the organic; separating action from reaction and thought from  emotion; focusing on what is happening at the ‘center’ of society, while ignoring  activity at the ‘margins’; carefully categorizing and classifying objects, animals, people, and ideas; working toward a discrete niche for every thing (and every  body), so that all would be in their designated places” (Meyrowitz, 2003, pp.  191, italics added). 

The result is that “we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology” (McLuhan, 2001, p. 16), entrenching that “our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used what counts, is the numb stance of a technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind” (McLuhan, 2001, p.  19). In this biased legacy data acquire their hybrid energy as an overheated cross fertilization of money and code, concealed by the rhetoric of the empowering web that we continue to handle as if it was cool.

It does make “all the difference if a hot medium is used in a hot or cool culture” (ibid., p. 33), because, actually, surveillance capitalism did not “strip away” our “illusion that the networked form has some kind of indigenous moral content, that being ‘connected’ is somehow intrinsically pro-social, innately inclusive, or naturally tending toward the democratization of knowledge” (Zuboff, 2019,  p. 7). This break boundary was passed in narcissus style, while we adopt metric ways of being and knowing until there’s no flesh left to chew on.  

“All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new  form […] and just as a metaphor transforms and transmits experience, so do the media. […] That is what is meant when we say that we daily know more and more about man. We mean that we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression that exceed ourselves. In the electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of our consciousness. But there is this  difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive.” (McLuhan, 2001, pp. 63, 64) 

A renaissance of McLuhan seems highly intuitive given the essential role our technologies of extraction play in “the ecological crisis as a crisis of what the dominant culture has made of reason” (Escobar, 2018, p. 95). The erosion of our planet (Crawford, 2021), surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) and the inhumane  objectification of the existential body (Lagerkvist, forthcoming) are, as interrelated crises, implications of datafication as our time’s “broad, and largely implicit configuration of knowledge that significantly shapes the knowledge produced without the awareness of those producing it” (Escobar, 2018, p. 92). They stem from reducing life to signification in and through media technologies which strip bodies of their embodied agency to rule over life by means of a lifeless copy.

To conceive of human  (and non-human) bodies as res extensa (Descartes, 1990) in disregard of their relationality, is a project firmly rooted in the rationalistic paradigm of which the distinction and subordination of lived experience to reason is the essential feature (Turner, 2008). By assuming that our senses deceive us and require taming through ‘pure’ intellect3 we’re caught up in a logocentrism which literally incorporates ontological dualism, by integrating the body into the subject-object divide. Suggesting that bodies resemble all other forms of devalued matter, the body is objectified, exploited and and governed like a thing.  

“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private  manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private company, or like giving the earths to a company as a monopoly. […] As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse” (McLuhan, 2001, p. 75). 

But fortunately, McLuhan also helps us to see, feel and awake to alternatives by reversing the human machine metaphor of functions to shed light on the phenomenological body as a medium and metaphor for relations. “For in operating in society with a new technology, it is […] the entire system that is changed. Each new impact shifts the ratios of all the senses” (ibid., pp., 70, 71): 

“Our very word ‘to grasp’ or ‘apprehension’ points to the very process of getting at one thing to another, of handling and sensing many facets at a time through more than one sense at a time. […] ‘Touch’ is not skin but the interplay of the  senses and ‘keeping in touch’ or ‘getting in touch’ is a matter of fruitful meeting of the senses, of sight translated into sound and sound into movement, and  taste and smell. The ‘common sense’ was for many centuries held to be the peculiar human power of translating one kind of experience of one sense into  all senses, and presenting the result as a unified image to the mind. In fact, this image of a unified ratio among the senses was long held to be the mark of our rationality […]” (ibid., pp. 66, 67). 

Here, “the body is not an I think”, but “a grouping of lived through meanings which moves towards its equilibrium” (Crossley, 2012, p. 134). “Accomplished at each moment of existence […] consciousness is being toward the thing through the intermediary of the body” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2013, p. 91) Consciousness is embodied knowledge as bodily integrity. The body is the message. And as such, it has emancipatory potential. Consequently, McLuhan lifts aesthetics, the cultivation of  sensual perception, as a site for freedom. Essentially, the artist’s engagement of her senses brings about an awareness of her situation – “the nature of the present”  (McLuhan, 2001, p. 72) – that allows her to confront control by anticipating the transforming vision and awareness that media provide, and engage with it intentionally (ibid., p. 66). When describing this quality, McLuhan adopts a phenomenological  stance, as he sees the artist’s ability to embrace “the discontinuities of present  experience with their demand for sensitive inspection and appraisal” based in “the  power for encountering the present actually” (ibid., pp. 76, 77). Thus, the artist “is the man (sic) of integral awareness” (ibid., pp. 72, italics added). Artistic and designerly ways of knowing become existential media techniques that put us in touch with reality by shedding light on “the indivisible relation between the formation of the world of human fabrication and the making of mankind itself (Fry, 2012, p. 1). 

The Medium and the Light 

As much as Innis’s and McLuhan’s visions may be disparaged as apolitical and  deterministic, they provide us with unique metaphors that can explain the central relation between media technologies and ways of knowing which constitute society for better or worse (cf. Sharma & Singh, 2022). By pinpointing how living ‘on automation’ deskills our sense for the existing and reduces life to a mere ‘fact’, they help us to think the interdependencies of power structures that bring about the existential crises that we face. As extensions of our bodies, media shape our perception and the institutions in and through which society organizes itself. Practically, our central nervous system has been extended to include all of humanity – and all of humanity runs together in each of us (Gustafsson, 2016, p. 40 ). Outsourcing our soma “the self that is a united  whole of mind and body, in which our physical being produces and affects our thinking, and our mental and emotional experiences influence physical outcomes” (Hook, 2018, p. 3) compromises an ethos of incommensurability that concerns each being. 

By reminding us of our unique, relational bodies situated in this ecology Innis and McLuhan pronounce that media matter existentially and suggest to approach technology through the thick and impure involvement evoked by their texts. By writing otherwise they counteract the dualist categorization and hierarchical classification of differences that media technologies co-constitute. For media scholars this suggests  approaching research interventions as an opportunity to fully exploit our material: both by problematizing how media operate dualist configurations of being, and, by  rationalizing how they embody alternatives. For media are and always will be in between4. Media are manifestations of ontological becoming par excellence. Accordingly, Ajana suggests that we “need to explore new ways of ‘performing’  academic writing, ways that blur the boundaries between the creative/experimental and the scholarly/academic […] that can implant the researcher straight at the heart  of the burning socio-political and ethical issues in a radically embodied and affective  way” (Beer, 2014, p. 331).

Rich stimuli for such activity, I would argue, can be found  in emergent literature- lab- and cyber cultures that engage alternative approaches to metaphysics, such as dreaming, alchemy, or witchcraft, to test how radical ontological and epistemological shifts could feel. Examples are the books of Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) and Ursula K. Le Guin (1996), and the holistic works by Giulia Tomasello (https://gitomasello.com/), Dreaming beyond AI (https://dreamingbeyond.ai/en), and Queering the Map (http://lucaslarochelle.com/queering-the-map). They challenge the  rational by the immeasurable by fleshing out the intelligible limits of metric measurement. Such limits expose the existential implications of today’s media technologies and suggest to endorse sensuous knowledge in order to breach the “robotic way that dominates how we view knowledge today” (Salami, 2020, p. 17). By proposing that “perhaps, incoherency does not signal a lack of meaning, but an excess of it” (Larochelle, 2022), they actualize the Torontonian faith in reversals as a method of hope. 

Epilogue 

The posthumous compilation The Medium and the Light. Reflections on religion (McLuhan, 2010) edited by McLuhan’s son, conveys that his father’s theories and spirituality were profoundly interlinked. As a classically educated literary scholar McLuhan was well versed in the Bible and Catholic philosophy. Once he decided to further explore the Christian faith, he chose to do so on its own terms. He kneeled and  repeated the same prayer for several years: “Show me”. And ‘suddenly’, ‘instantly’ and ‘not in any expected way’, McLuhan was shown. The Medium and the Light restores what McLuhan perceived as a religious understatement in today’s media development. He saw a parallel between the Christian faith’s deepest secret about the world as the body of Christ and the media development that binds together and enables encounters  and interaction across the earth. In the external sense, the world is becoming ”a single body” through media (Gustafsson, 2016).

Footnotes:

1 Cultures that have been denied and dispossessed for centuries, which points to a particularly problematic shortcoming of McLuhan’s reductive and apolitical theories of ‘tribal cultures’, ‘tribalization’ and racialized and  gendered culture per se as emphasized in the crucial anthology edited by Sharma, S., & Singh, R. (2022). Re understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan. Duke University Press.

2 This is, of course, the realm of Marshall McLuhan who will be discussed at length further below, once Innis’s  contribution is satisfied. 

3 A configuration of knowledge that ‘translates’ mind to reason to science to fact which founds our faith in  computational processes (and artificial intelligence) as autonomous and objective analysis.

4 Or middling, as John Durham Peters remarks Peters, J. D. (2022). What Is Not a Medium. Communication +1, 9(1). 

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