The Mechanical Handmaiden Rhetoric After Marshall McLuhan

Despite a recent revival, Marshall McLuhan remains stranded on the theoretical margins of communication scholarship. Whether primarily because of his aphoristic and ambiguous writing or because of the immense difficulties posed by his thought for the study of communication, his peripheral status sidesteps around the important contributions he has made to understanding human discourse and interaction. In an effort to confront and reclaim McLuhan from the margins, this article considers the consequences of his thought for a subset of communication scholarship: the study of rhetoric. We contend that McLuhan’s work offers certain correctives to the conventional study of rhetoric that make possible a confluence of rhetorical criticism and media ecology, a convergence necessitated by the politics and ideologies of today’s changing media environment.