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114 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
the perspective of medium, and each of them can become the basis for
revealing the limitations of the content views of both forms of media.
One of the obstacles to fruitfully comparing and contrasting the two
kinds of social medium that are carried by network and broadcast is the
fact that the discourses around ‘medium’ are, typically, technologically
reductive. Certainly, it is commonplace to think of the Internet as a
medium in a way which is contrasted with television as a medium. 22
Similarly, distinguishing between technologies within the same sociolog-
ical medium has the same effect (for example, see Marc’s [2000] discus-
23
sion of radio and television as separate mediums). To contrast television
with the Internet sharpens a period distinction between media forms, but
softens and obscures the analysis of broadcast and network as distinctive
integrative ‘shapes’, as discussed above. However, this relationship is
seldom adequately theorized. For example, even though McLuhan is
heralded as having ‘understood the Internet’ in the 1960s, the Internet in
itself is not a medium in the sense in which medium is explored by
McLuhan. For McLuhan, as we have seen in the previous chapter, medi-
ums are much more tied to how they extend individual bodily senses.
Some technologies extend just one sense (telephone – the ear; print – the
eye) while others extend numerous senses at once (cinema, television and
the computer, in which a variety of hot and cool ‘effects’ are produced).
Moreover, McLuhan’s paradigm has the (perhaps accidental) virtue of
grouping broadcast technologies according to the personal-social experi-
ences they produce. Thus TV is considered to be an acoustic medium like
radio, in which sound represents the privately experienced equivalent of
a social world characterized by ‘information from all directions’.
However, the Internet as a form of ‘cyberspace’ increasingly comes to
be termed a ‘medium’ in itself. For example, Christopher Horrocks (2001)
argues that McLuhan’s insights ‘now seem appropriate for a medium
that arrived just after his message faded’ (5). Although Horrocks’ essay
‘explores the encounter of Marshall McLuhan’s major insights into media
and technology with the present world of information networks,
e-commerce, digital technology and the age of virtual reality’ (4), the pro-
24
ject of defining the Internet as a medium is left unaccomplished. If any-
thing, Horrocks is able to stress the continuities between broadcast and
interactive communication through his exploration of the meaning of vir-
tuality. For McLuhan, interactivity does not have to be defined as interac-
tion between individuals through a medium, but can be defined as
interaction with a medium itself. We might recall McLuhan’s discussion
of hot mediums as rich in information intensity (approximating virtual
reality) but low in interactivity. Cool mediums require higher scales of
interactivity from listeners/viewers/users. Thus, to follow McLuhan’s def-
inition, interactivity is common to both the first and second media age, but
contention remains as to whether, with New Media, individuals desire to
simulate a face-to-face environment or are content to interact only with
the medium itself.