The mediological method pays specific attention to the role of organisations and technical innovations, and the ways in which these can ensure the potency of cultural transmission - and thus the transformation of ideas into a civilisational worldview capable of sustained action.
The first, by the screenwriter Yvette Bíró (Wide Angle magazine, Vol.18, No.1, January 1996), was a four-page book review of Debray's Vie et Mort de l'Image, in which she claimed to have discerned "traces of a strong, vulgar Marxist school of thought".
In concluding the review Nayor notes the similarities of some aspects and directions of mediology to Birmingham School cultural studies ranging from "Raymond Williams through Stuart Hall".
Physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont have criticized Debray's work for using Gödel's theorem as a metaphor without understanding its basic ideas, in their book Fashionable Nonsense.
Debray engaged in dialogue with Bricmont in a 2003 book titled "À l'ombre des lumières : Débat entre un philosophe et un scientifique", which so far has not been translated into English.
[3] Despite such criticisms, the six-volume New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (2004) wrote of Debray that "His achievement is to have synthesized these earlier arguments into a practice with a powerful political project ahead of it."