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McLuhan and Baudrillard: Masters of Implosion - Gary Genosko

Publisher: Routledge | ISBN: 0415190614 | edition 1999 | 140 pages

In McLuhan and Baudrillard, Gary Genosko traces McLuhan's influence on the influential French postmodernist thinker, Jean Baudrillard.

Marshall McLuhan, the media guru of the 1960s, has not been forgotten. Almost two decades after his death, a McLuhan renaissance is under way, fuelled by the very developments in new media technologies he long ago predicted. His famous buzzphrases, “the medium is the message” and “the Global Village,” are once again in circulation. Setting out the theoretical and historical context of this renaissance, McLuhan and Baudrillard: The Masters of Implosion traces the impact of McLuhan’s ideas on French cultural life and in postmodern theory.

Tracing parallels between the so-called “McLuhan Cult” of the 1960s and the “Baudrillard Scene” of the 1980s, Gary Genosko explores how McLuhan’s ideas persist and are distorted through Baudrillard’s work, via concepts such as semiurgy, participation, reversibility, the primitive/tribal and implosion. He argues that it is through Baudrillard’s influence that McLuhanism has had its greatest impact on contemporary cultural thought and practice.

Gary Genosko is Senior Research Fellow of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.