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The Interrelation between Broadcast and Network Communication 115
In Arthur Kroker’s view, interactivity is not important; rather, what
is significant is that we live in a processed world in which all individuals
are essentially x-rayed by media:

For McLuhan, it’s a processed world now. As we enter the electronic age
with its instantaneous and global movement of information, we are the first
human beings to live completely within the mediated environment of the
technostructure. The ‘content’ of the technostructure is largely irrelevant
(the ‘content’ of a new technology is always the technique which has just
been superseded: movies are the content of television; novels are the con-
tent of movies) or, in fact, a red herring distracting our attention from the
essential secret of technology as the medium, or environment, within which
human experience is programmed. It was McLuhan’s special genius to
grasp at once that the content (metonymy) of new technologies serves as
a ‘screen’, obscuring from view the disenchanted locus of the technological
experience in its purely ‘formal’ or ‘spatial’ properties. McLuhan wished to
escape the ‘flat earth approach’ to technology, to invent a ‘new metaphor’
by which we might ‘restructure our thoughts and feelings’ about the sub-
liminal, imperceptible environments of media effects. (Kroker, 2001: 56–7)

But what of the distinction between broadcast and interactive soli-
darity? If broadcast is also a medium of interactivity, what is the standing
of these two forms as ‘mediums’. From McLuhan the Wired magazine
editors have taken up the idea of the Internet as an extension of con-
sciousness itself. Horrocks (2001) quotes McLuhan: ‘The next medium,
whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include
television as its content, not as its environment ...’ (pp. 52–53). Here
McLuhan suggests television is itself a medium, and that whatever super-
sedes it will interiorize it. Certainly, cyber-utopians celebrate the idea that
the World Wide Web is a place where every netizen can broadcast their
own moving video or digital images. Paul Levinson (1999) suggests that
the Internet is a ‘meta-medium’ which includes ‘the written word in
forms ranging from love letters to newspapers, plus telephone, radio
(“RealAudio” on the Web), and moving images with sound which can be
considered a version of television’ (37–8).
This problem of medium is fruitfully explored by Joshua Meyrowitz
in his essay ‘Understandings of Media’ (1999). Meyrowitz argues that three
key metaphors have prevailed in the thinking of medium: medium-as-
vessel/conduit, medium-as-language and medium-as-environment (44).
The first kind of metaphor, medium-as-vessel/conduit, is the most
common. It is a metaphor in which a medium is regarded as a container
for sending or storing content. It leads people to ask: ‘What is the content?
How did the content get there? How accurately does the media content
reflect “reality”? How do people interpret the content? What effects does
the content have?’ (45). For Meyrowitz, this metaphor is so prevalent
because it appears to transcend both mediated and unmediated interac-
tion. It provides for intentionality across different media: ‘We all have a