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Theories of Broadcast Media 41
passive (as in a hot medium), they are nevertheless able to experience
mutual presence as the really real.
Most controversial among McLuhan’s theories is his later emphasis
on the human–technical extension argument where the definition of what
qualifies as media is dramatically extended. In a shift from ‘the medium
is the message’ to ‘the medium is the massage’ (see McLuhan and Fiore,
1967), McLuhan views anything that can extend the body’s senses and
biological capabilities (psychic or physical) as earning the status of media.
‘The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye,
clothing an extension of skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central
nervous system’ (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967: 31–41). Whilst, as we shall see
in later chapters, there are enormous problems in referring CITs (commu-
nication and information technologies) exclusively back to the body in a
kind of corporeal essentialism, McLuhan paradoxically allows us to
understand recent developments in the convergence of CITs with trans-
portational and architectural technologies in a way that is most useful. 23
The cryptic eccentricity of McLuhan’s work overshadowed some of
his contemporaries, who, in a number of ways, were more comprehensive
and rigorous in their analysis of technical mediums of communication
and forms of political power.
One such writer, Harold Innis, presented a medium theory which is
perhaps more user-friendly for a theory of broadcast. In The Bias of
24
Communications (1964, originially published 1951) Innis makes a major
distinction between two kinds of ‘empires’ of communication. The first,
corresponding to the printing press and electronic communication, results
in spatial domination (of nations and of populations) – what he calls a
‘space bias’ – whilst the second, ‘time bias’, based on oral culture and the
cloistered world of the manuscript, accommodates memory and continu-
ity. For Innis, the oral tradition needs to be reclaimed. Broadcast belongs
to the empire of space, and in the time he was writing, the early 1950s, it
had come to structure prevailing power relations.
As David Crowley and David Mitchell (1995) depict him:

Innis … saw a recurrent dialectic in History where one medium asserted
primacy in a society, followed by efforts to bypass the social power that gath-
ered around the control of that medium … each new mode of communica-
tion was associated with tearing individuals and their entire forms of life out
of their traditional moorings in locality and place and relocating them within
larger and more dispersed forms of influence. With modernity, this process
of co-location of the self within multiple spaces, identities, and influences
intensifies; human agency itself is progressively pulled away from the local
and reconstituted within the expanding possibilities of the modern. (8)
Despite a lapse in the momentum of medium theory in the 1970s, it
certainly had some sophisticated exponents in the 1980s and 1990s,
among whom Joshua Meyrowitz, whose work is explored further in the
following chapters, is exemplary.