McLuhan and Baudrillard

Marshall McLuhan, the media guru of the 1960s, has not been forgotten. Almost two decades after his death, a McLuhan renaissance is underway, fuelled by the very developments in new media technologies he long ago predicted. His famous buzzphrases, the medium is the message and the global village, are once again in circulation. In McLuhan and Baudrillard, Gary Genosko traces McLuhans influence on a guru of cultural theory – the French postmodernist thinker, Jean Baudrillard. Gary Genosko argues that McLuhans ideas have been far more influential than hitherto imagined in the development of postmodern theory. Tracing parallels between the so-called McLuhan Cult of the 1960s and the Baudrillard Scene of the 1980s, he explores how McLuhans ideas persist and are distorted through Baudrillards work, via concepts such as semiurgy, participation, reversibility, the primitive/tribal, and implosion. He argues that it is through Baudrillad’s influence that McLuhanism has had its greatest impact on contemporary cultural thought and practice.

Author Biography

Gary Genosko is Senior Research Fellow of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.