Non-Places and Extended Minds: Augé and McLuhan in the Digital Age

Thesis

This article argues that Augé’s concept of the non-place and McLuhan’s notion of media as extensions of the human body converge on the same diagnosis: digital media create powerful prosthetic environments that intensify communication while thinning symbolic and human presence. The internet thus becomes both a non-place and an extension of the nervous system, producing a technologically mediated form of “non-human” space.

Introduction

When Marc Augé published Non-Places in the early 1990s, the internet had not yet become a defining structure of everyday life. His analysis focused instead on physical infrastructures—airports, highways, shopping centers—through which contemporary existence increasingly flowed. Around the same time, Marshall McLuhan’s media theory was gaining renewed attention, especially his claim that technologies function as extensions of the human nervous system. Although their conceptual vocabularies differ, both thinkers converge on a question that has become unavoidable in the digital age: what kind of space does technologically mediated humanity inhabit?

Augé offers a theory of spatial abstraction, while McLuhan develops a theory of sensory and cognitive prosthesis. Read together, they illuminate the internet not merely as a tool or a medium, but as a non-place produced by technological extension.

The Logic of the Non-Place

For Augé, an anthropological place is defined by three elements: identity, relation, and history. A village, a neighborhood, or a city square acquires meaning through shared memory and symbolic inscription. A non-place, by contrast, lacks these dimensions. It does not anchor personal identity, cultivate collective narratives, or preserve temporal continuity. Instead, it is governed by signage, instructions, and contractual relations.

Airports, supermarkets, hotel chains, and highways do not host dwelling; they organize movement. One passes through them as a passenger, customer, or user—figures defined less by social belonging than by functional roles. In Non-Places, Augé argues that such environments are characteristic of what he calls surmodernité, an intensified form of modernity shaped by speed, mobility, and abstraction.

More than two decades later, in his lecture Identity and Human Rights, Augé extends this diagnosis to digital culture. When listing the infrastructures that organize contemporary experience, he includes “telephones, the internet, television, cable systems,” placing them alongside transport networks and systems of circulation. The internet thus enters his framework not as a novelty, but as a continuation of the same spatial logic: a system for organizing movement, this time of signs rather than bodies.

McLuhan and the Logic of Extension

McLuhan approaches the technological condition from a different angle. For him, every medium extends some human faculty: the wheel prolongs the foot, writing amplifies memory, electronic media project the nervous system outward. In Understanding Media, he writes that “any extension of ourselves in a new technical form immediately affects the whole psychic and social complex” (McLuhan, 1964, p. 4).

The importance of a medium lies less in what it transmits than in how it reshapes perception, attention, and relation. This is the force of McLuhan’s well-known claim that “the medium is the message.” Technologies alter the conditions under which meaning appears long before any specific content is exchanged.

From this perspective, the internet does not merely carry communication; it reorganizes how human beings experience presence, memory, and sociality. It becomes a prosthetic environment in which identity and relation are continuously reformatted.

Internet as an Extended Non-Place

Viewed through both lenses, the internet emerges as a striking hybrid: an extension of human cognition that produces a non-place. It expands memory, speed, and reach, yet the space it generates resists symbolic anchoring. Users encounter one another through interfaces, profiles, passwords, and protocols—forms of access rather than expressions of lived history.

Its temporal structure is equally revealing. Digital platforms operate in a permanent present: feeds refresh, posts disappear, archives grow without becoming memory. Information accumulates while shared historicity remains thin. Communication intensifies even as meaning becomes more volatile.

McLuhan called this condition Narcissus narcosis: humans grow numb to their own extensions, mistaking technological prostheses for natural capacities. Augé offers the spatial corollary: people mistake non-places for places. They feel socially present while inhabiting environments designed for circulation rather than belonging.

Non-Human Space

What emerges from this convergence is not the disappearance of humanity but its displacement into environments that lack anthropological depth. The internet becomes a form of non-human space—not hostile to people, but structured around flows, data, and operations rather than memory, ritual, or symbolic thickness.

Relations remain possible, yet they are increasingly mediated by systems that privilege efficiency over inscription. Co-presence takes the place of co-existence. One is constantly connected, yet rarely grounded.

Conclusion

Augé and McLuhan never engaged one another directly, yet their ideas converge with remarkable precision in the age of the internet. One reveals how modern spaces lose their anthropological depth; the other shows how technologies externalize the human nervous system. Together they describe a world in which extended minds move through non-places, connected everywhere yet grounded nowhere.

Acknowledgment

This article was inspired in part by a comment from Ben OrSon on my earlier piece, “Internet as a Non-Place: A Late Update of Marc Augé,” whose reflections helped clarify the conceptual link between non-places and media as human extensions.

References

Augé, M. (1995). Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity (J. Howe, Trans.). Verso.
Augé, M. (n.d.). Identity and human rights. University lecture.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. McGraw-Hill.
Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Blackwell.