Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to determine the extent to which Marshall McLuhan’s performance of his media texts influenced their form and the ways in which he disseminated his message. From The Gutenberg Galaxy to Understanding Media to the medium is the MASSAGE his style changed significantly. Throughout much of his career he was driven both by his foundational aphorism that the medium is the message, and also by his desire to create a discipline, that of communication/media studies, from the tools he had crafted in order to probe his ideas. By looking at the ways in which his ideas came together, through agency and praxis, and how he put
them into play by crafting his texts to resemble his theories, I aim to both understand his concepts better and also show how he became a performer targeted at the media that were presenting his ideas, from print to radio to television. A driving question of this thesis is why were McLuhan, and this theories, dismissed for so long?