ABSTRACT
Extratextual materials act as reinforcement to the indigenous myth projected into America’s transparent texts. These are the extensions of media, and only recently have scholars become interested in them. Past scholarly interest was in the flow going the other way. McLuharis (1964) Understanding Media was subtitled “The Extensions of Man” [sic]. For McLuhan, media were the extensions of the human body, bonus electronic eyes, ears, and limbs. Furthermore, the media were, for him, an extension of the human mind:
It is a principal aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system. Our central nervous system is not merely an electric network, but it constitutes a single unified field of experience. (p. 348)
So, bodies and minds have been extended beyond their traditional organic confines and projected onto the objective world of nature. The subjective world punctured the objective world as subject and self transcends body: The mind and its informants transcend their shell and replicate themselves outside it, making the actual an even greater extension of the internal. That model of media, one in which they are an extension of the human body and self, continue to define media theory (e.g., Brummett & Duncan, 1992).
