Deleuze the media ecologist? Extensions of and advances on McLuhan

The authors argue that Gilles Deleuze can be read as a media ecologist, extending many insights of Marshall McLuhan’s including the idea that the medium is the message, that the content of any medium is another medium, and that media extend and alter human faculties. Yet since McLuhan preferred to write in axioms and probes, Deleuze provides a more robust theorizing of these issues. Specifically, Deleuze advances on McLuhan by providing a more complex notion of media as assemblages, avoiding the dilemmas of technological determinism, by developing a more robust way of understanding affect and desire, away from McLuhan’s notion of sensory ratios, and by establishing power and ethics as central concerns, against McLuhan’s primarily descriptive scholarly approach. We conclude that Deleuze thus illustrates the continuing relevance of McLuhan’s foundational work, yet his advances on McLuhan offer many prospects for improving the study of media from a media ecological perspective.