As far as the operations of technical mass media were concerned, Marshall McLuhan was one of the first thinkers to offer a theory of modern technical media. His famous saying ‘the medium is the message’ (1964) distracts the cognitive interest from media contents (such as the story of a novel or a film) towards the recognition of the forms of media as structuring and semantic devices. The idea of media-structuring knowledge was completely new to a philosophical hermeneutic and humanist position which had been eager to ignore questions of the technicality of communication and content. Additionally, his understanding of media as ‘bodily extensions’ is a consequence of his notion of media processes and their structuring of a social and cultural order.

Marshall McLuhan developed a set of ideas on media which were contradictory and pointed to various aspects of media and media theory. His various approaches entail the idea of hot and cool media and media as bodily extensions. His remarks on cybernation offer an understanding of the computer as medium of communication long before the communicative and interactive aspects of the computer had been explored and developed.

Three aspects of his media theory will be addressed in the following essay:

1. His remarks on the bodily aspect of media – he reintroduces the body as a signifying and conceptual device into media theory – opposing the theories of Walter Benjamin and his attitude towards film.

2. […]

This collection of essays brings together Canadian and European views of Marshall McLuhan in a transatlantic perspective. They were gathered in the spirit of commemorating McLuhan's one hundredth birthday, not in his Canadian birthplace or in the university where he taught for many years, but in the form of a conference organized by a European Canadian Studies centre which is part of the international network of centres meaningfully linked in a way that would have been almost unthinkable without McLuhan's concept of the ‘global village’. Such a transatlantic enterprise is all the more meaningful since McLuhan, al though generally seen as a typical representative of North American media culture, received important parts of his literary education on the European side of the Atlantic Ocean, at the University of Cambridge. Even though Cambridge may have been a shock to him, as the famous dictum quoted by Bernhard J. Dotzler in the title of his essay in this volume suggests, it was also a major influence on his reading and interpreting strategies.

The transatlantic perspective has been shaping the discussion of the impact of technical media on collective cultures over the last decades. Furthering McLuhan's concept of media as underlying organizers of knowledge, the German media scholar Friedrich Kittler widens his literary approach by incorporating writing as a technological adventure – writing and literary contents thus become an effect of technical media.