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38 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
the act of staging the communication; instead of producing meaning, it
exhausts itself in the staging of meaning’. Here Baudrillard argues that
meaning is devoured more rapidly than it can be reinjected insofar as
information and the image become self-referential – ‘a closed circuit’ (99).
Secondly, the media do not bring about socialization, but the implosion of
social relationships in the only remaining relationship created by the mass
media – the masses. Insofar as all relationships must ‘pass though’ the
media relationship, they suffer the entropic force that is the condition of
simulacra. 17 The implosion of meaning right down to the microscopic
level of an individual sign, what a word can mean, is mirrored by this
macroscopic implosion of the social, in a way that echoes McLuhan’s
formula – the medium is the massage.
The ‘mass’-age, in Baudrillard’s terminology, is an exclusive effect
rather than a precondition of the media. The mass and the media are the
shadow of each other, and when dynamics of simulacra prevail, that insti-
tution known as the ‘social’ becomes outmoded, absorbed into the image.
In this world the individual becomes ‘a pure screen, a switching centre for
all the networks of influence’ (1983: 133), in a world wherein ‘we form a
mass, living most of the time in panic or haphazardly, above and beyond
meaning’ (1983: 11).
Here the media no longer function as a massive lie in pretending to
represent fiction as the real or the real as fiction. What Baudrillard means
by hyperreality or simulation is different. There can no longer be a con-
trast with the real; rather, the real is produced out of itself as the perfor-
mativity of the mass media is amplified above all other events.
For Baudrillard, the masses aren’t the kind of duped underclass that
are to be manipulated by the media and politicians (a notable departure
from the mass/elite and Marxist frameworks); rather, they are a kind of
ground of absorption and massive gravitation which neutralizes all
meaning and creates the conditions for a society of nihilism and cynicism.
The masses are a stronger medium than all the media: ‘it is the
former who envelop and absorb the latter – or at least there is no priority
of one over the other. The mass and the media are one single process.
Mass(age) is the message’ (Baudrillard, 1983: 44).

The medium is the message – McLuhan, Innis and Meyrowitz

The final important perspective on broadcast media that I want to explore
is that of Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, which Joshua Meyrowitz
has called ‘medium’ theory. Whilst not having as much currency as the
‘spectacle’ and ideology frameworks, it has recently received a large amount
of attention (see Adilkno, 1998; Bolter and Grusin, 1999; Goodheart, 2000;
Jordan, 1999; Meyrowitz, 1995, 1999; Skinner, 2000; Wark, 2000). Most of
this attention is directed towards seeing McLuhan as a rediscovered