The Medium Picture

by Roy Christopher, Andrew McLuhan (Foreword by)

Overview

The ever-evolving ways that we interact with each other, our world, and ourselves through technology is a topic as worn as the devices we clutch and carry every day. How did we get here? Drawing from the disciplines of media ecology and media archaeology, as well as bringing fresh perspectives from subcultures of music and skateboarding, The Medium Picture illuminates aspects of technological mediation that have been overlooked along the way. Roy Christopher’s high-tempo, lucid prose shows us how immersion in unmoored technologies of connectivity places us in a world of pure media and redefines who we are, how we are, and what we will be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820374352
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	10/15/2025
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

ROY CHRISTOPHER is an aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid. That’s where he learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. His books include Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future; Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism; and Post-Self: Journeys beyond the Human Body. He holds a PhD in communication studies from the University of Texas at Austin and writes regularly at roychristopher.com.

ROY CHRISTOPHER is an aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid. That’s where he learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. His books include Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future; Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism; and Post-Self: Journeys beyond the Human Body. He holds a PhD in communication studies from the University of Texas at Austin and writes regularly at roychristopher.com.

Editorial Reviews

Through music, generational habits, pre- and post-internet cultures, and a multitude of ‘cognitive entanglements’, this book flows with grace across different scales of mediation and affect.

author of Operational Images - Jussi Parikka

Brilliant, pathbreaking, palpable insights…Worthy of McLuhan.

author of The Silk Code - Paul Levinson

If the medium is the message, then today’s mediascape is a constant digital missive, reminding us that we are trapped together in a seven-level underworld metaverse mall. Who better to help guide us through this neo-Dantesque pixel inferno than Roy Christopher—one part Virgil, one partDebord, and at least one part his mischievous and brilliant self.

author of Infinite Distraction - Dominic Pettman

Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.

award-winning author of Neuromancer - William Gibson

Immersed in the contemporary digital culture he grew up with as a teenager, Roy Christopher is old enough to recall vinyl, punk, and zines — social media before TikTok and smartphones. The Medium Picture deftly illuminates the connections between post-punk music critique, the increasing virtualization of culture, the history of formal media theory, the liminal zones of analog versus digital, pop versus high culture, capitalism versus anarchy. It’s the kind of book that makes you stop and think and scribble in the margins.

author of The Virtual Community - Howard Rheingold

A synthesis of theory and thesis, research and personal recollection, The Medium Picture is a work of rangy intelligence and wandering curiosity. Thought-provoking and a pleasure to read.

award-winning author of Interior Chinatown - Charles Yu

Like a skateboarder repurposing the utilitarian textures of the urban terrain for sport, Roy Christopher reclaims the content and technologies of the media environment as a landscape to be navigated and explored. The Medium Picture is both a highly personal yet revelatory chronicle of a decades-long encounter with mediated popular culture.

documentarian and award-winning author of Coercion - Douglas Rushkoff