Beckett, McLuhan, and Television: The Medium, the Message, and “the Mess”

Sociologist manuel castells’s sweeping three-volume study, The Information Age, begins with the assertion: “Our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self” (1: 3). The Net, a term covering the ever-expanding networked communication media, he defines as fluid and constantly changing, while the Self is in a constant search for some fixity or surety now that primary markers of identity-sexual, religious, ethnic, territorial-are no longer clearly delineated or self-evident.