Screening Fears: On Protective Media, by Francesco Casetti

Abstract

One of the central tenets of contemporary media theory is encapsulated in Marshall McLuhan’s famous proposition that media are “extensions of man”, that they prolong our senses into the world. In his latest book, Francesco Casetti challenges exactly this assumption by arguing that media just as much protect and enclose, as they extend and protract. He claims that what he calls “the projection/protection complex […] stands for a set of interrelated processes and components […] aimed at creating a ‘protected’ confrontation with the world and at the same time at ‘projecting’ individuals beyond the safe space in which they are located” (14). Like Deleuze and Guattari took Freud’s Oedipus theory and turned it on its head (in Anti-Oedipus), Screening Fears could be read as a kind of “Anti-McLuhan” which acknowledges the significance of the original, but adds important dimensions to it.

Keywords

• media theory
• protection
• phantasmagoria
• film
• digital media