Mass Media as a Form of Mass: The Millions Interviews Nick Ripatrazone

I first took Marshall McLuhan seriously when I was trying to claim in my dissertation that John Milton’s Paradise Lost is, among other things, a network of media effects. McLuhan’s The Medium and the Light and Understanding Media: The Extension of Man gave me the language I needed to persuade that Milton’s media ecologies—his gardens, his use of the epic form—are more important than his content (I’ve never really been that interested in Milton’s theology). Though McLuhan was interested in television and nascent computing networks, his famous maxim—“The medium is the message”—offered me a way of grappling with form and its world-shaping force in our lives.

By the time I was integrating McLuhan into my writing, though, his star as a theorist had faded.  McLuhan’s over-saturation within his own media environments in the mid-20th century—the magazine covers, the television appearances, and the debates with the likes of W.H. Auden and Norman Mailer—turned him into a caricature. Yet his theories and his non-linear approach to observing how media rich environments shape our thinking and way of being in the world paved the way for contemporary discussions of affordance within our digital modes of experience.

In his new book Digital Communion: Marshall McLuhan’s Spiritual Vision for a Digital Age (Fortress Press, 2022), Nick Ripatrazone puts McLuhan the media theorist, the glib performer, the Renaissance scholar, and the devout Roman Catholic on full display. And he makes compelling claims for revitalizing McLuhan’s ideas and his methods today, as we navigate the digital worlds McLuhan predicted. In Ripatrazone’s view, it is McLuhan’s Roman Catholic faith that has been underexplored and remains necessary for appraising his work and applying it within both sacred and secular environments today.

We talked over a week through both written correspondence and a Zoom conversation, a mix of media