Abstract

This dissertation explores contributions made by Marshall McLuhan to the study of communication in general, and material culture as media in particular. We investigate what McLuhan had to say about the "ground" of media, that is about material culture as a medium of communication. We will introduce a distinction between what we normally call media---here we will call them explicit media---and material culture writ large which we will call the implicit media. We will use this distinction to re-read McLuhan in the interest of sketching what his work might contribute for our understanding of our emergent material culture, our "lively stuff." ;We, in the "First World," live in an age of unprecedented material diversity and abundance. Our material culture has become proliferant, pervasive, programmed and programmable, increasingly performative, and permutative . If, as McLuhan said, our species has become the "sex organs" for our materiality, then what sort of "species" are we serving to reproduce and advance? ;This study is "impelled" by McLuhan's ideas, but we will also need to explore the matters missed in what McLuhan said. We will turn to disciplines outside of, main-stream communication studies to accomplish this---specifically anthropology, consumer studies and the history, theory and critical literature on design. Having done this, we will return to our new technologies and see what McLuhan's insights offer by way of tools for pragmatic personal and public deliberations on the place of our material culture in our past, present and future. ;We explore an aspect of McLuhan's work. My own research, reported here, is based on the published McLuhan corpus, readings in related critical and interpretive literature as well as original documentary work done in the McLuhan collections at the National Archives of Canada in Ottawa