ABSTRACT
As far as the operations of technical mass media were concerned, Marshall McLuhan was one of the rst thinkers to o er 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 lm) towards the recognition of the forms of media as structuring and semantic devices.1 e 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.2 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.3
