This article examines alternative metaphors for media, suggesting new ways to think about its role and implications.
Marshall McLuhan’s root metaphor, media as extensions of humans, although not the only metaphor for media in his corpus, has dominated our theoretical imagination for a long time. Without denying its serviceability, this article ventures beyond McLuhan’s arch-metaphor to explore other ‘radical’ ways of understanding media. Each entry, if it generates enough dialogue, has the potential to evolve into a speculative project in its own right.
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Peter Zhang (2025) studied this question.
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