Liturgie di presenza. ‘Canali magici’ e vita quotidiana

The relationship between media and magic has been foreseen by Marshall McLuhan more than four decades ago. Media are magic because they are forms of ‘applied knowledge’, allowing to reduce distance in space and time: or, as Mauss put it, to cancel the interval between desire and fulfillment. In a ‘disenchanted world’, media, as extensions of senses, also allow a ‘enhanced sensitivity’ and, in the contemporary post-media condition – where the boundaries between media themselves, and between media and environment tend to blur – they foster a sense of presence and reality of either the self, the world (as an antidote to the ‘loss of presence’ in the age of risk), the relationships.