Return to Saussure

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 ...