ABSTRACT
Marshall McLuhan developed a set of ideas on media which were contradictory and pointed to various aspects of media and media theory. Additionally, his famous saying 'the medium is the message' distracts the cognitive interest from media contents towards the recognition of the forms of media as structuring and semantic devices. An aspect of McLuhan's approach to cybernetics is the new affective dimension of media practice: the medium of film has brought to an end a long-standing development of suppressing the senses. Cybernetics can be conceptualized as a strategy to introduce technical thinking into the humanities, since it evolved around the technical and mechanical structures of human life and the organization of society. As one of the first thinkers within the North American context, McLuhan offered a general theory of media as communication machines and instances addressing the structuring of the senses.
