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Three cheers for Edmonton city council.  According to the Edmonton Journal, media philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s childhood home will be preserved after city councillors voted to give the Edmonton Arts Council $75,000 to help buy the site.

The arts organization plans to use most of the main floor of the home, at 11342 64th St., for a library, and public displays about McLuhan, whose family moved in when he was one year old,  in 1912. The second floor, basement and garage will be turned into offices, suites for visiting artists and space for a writer in residence.

Although McLuhan once dubbed the ‘Dr. Spock of Pop Culture’ worked most of his life at the University of Toronto, he often returned to Edmonton, where he was born. He died in 1980. An international conference  was held in Edmonton last year to mark the centennial of his birth.   http://tinyurl.com/bv9lmdb

11342 64th Street, Edmonton, Alberta

A 12-part LRC [Literary Review of Canada] series, featuring text and iPhone Hipstamatic photography by Rita Leistner . It covers territory originally explored by McLuhan in “War & Peace in the Global Village”(1968), using his ideas as the basis for a series of probes.

Editor’s note: this series ran from February 02 to March 13, 2012. It is best appreciated when followed from the first post. An archive of all the posts can be viewed here. 

 

 

 

 

 

IPROBE 9_THE WRITTEN WORD – PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK

(photo: Rita Leistner/basetrack.org)

GO BEYOND THIS POINT AT YOUR OWN RISK

IF YOU ARE CAPTURED BY THE TALIBAN

YOUR BLOOD IS ON YOUR OWN HANDS

Writing is an extension of the hand and of the eye;
Writing is a visual artifact that stands in for man; The written word replaces the ear with the eye.

Photographs of signage explicitly show how written language is a visual artifact, a central theme of Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy. Grammar and style are kinds of behaviour that can reveal, through a close reading (exegesis), the sources of the texts.

McLuhan’s foundational concept is that language is a technology, and the written word (like unmanned Predator drones) is a way of conveying a message from a (safe) distance. He calls it “an eye for an ear,” (Understanding Media, p. 81) because writing comes from the oral and the acoustic (not the other way around). And while you can have a flourishing oral or “non-literate” culture with no written script, you can’t have the reverse.

McLuhan believed that in some ways this gives non-literate cultures an advantage over literate ones—their dependence on oral communication forces a closeness in the community, a kind of tribalism and unity, and simultaneously a resistance to written artifacts (language or propaganda) originating from outside the tribe. During the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel War, Predator drones dropped reams of leaflets warning the people of Lebanon against supporting Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. In Afghanistan, where the non-literacy rate is over 75 percent, and much higher in the remote areas most likely to support the Taliban, disseminating these kinds of flyers would be futile. The Taliban benefit enormously from non-literacy because it reduces the likelihood of individuals assimilating rogue information and separating from the tribal hive.

One day some Marines returned to the Shir Ghazay Patrol Base with a sign they’d found while on patrol. They’d gone out without an interpreter, so they carried it back to base to have it translated. It was handwritten in black marker on corrugated cardboard in a form of Arabic script, presumably Pashto (the dominant language of southern Afghanistan), and was fastened to a two-by-four with some nails and cut pieces of tire rubber. They said it was surrounded by three rocks that someone had painted red.

Interpreters are prime targets for the Taliban, who see them as enemy collaborators, and so for their own safety it’s not uncommon to go on routine patrols without them. Photojournalists protect the identities of interpreters for the same reason, blacking out their faces if they should appear in any photographs that might be published.

It’s hard to find enough Afghans with sufficient language skills willing to take the enormous risks of working for foreign militaries. Although most educated Afghans to some extent speak both official languages (Dari and Pashto), the vast majority of interpreters are from the north and Dari (also known as Afghan Persian) is their mother tongue. Dari and Pashto are both of Indo-European origin and both use a modified Arabic script for their writing, but the two languages are not mutually intelligible. The anthropologist Louis Dupree describes that “the difference between Dari and Pashto is analogous to the range of differences between English and German, or French and Spanish” (Afghanistan, p. 70).

One of the two interpreters on base struggled with the sign. “It’s very badly written,” he said. “I can’t fully make it out. But it is a warning of some kind from the Taliban.” The Marines mistook this to mean that the interpreter couldn’t read his own language, and they told him so. Another interpreter gave it a try and determined the sign had something to do with blocking the way—the three red painted rocks seemed to confirm that interpretation.

Even had the Marines wanted to return the sign so that others might heed its warning, it would have been too dangerous to go back.

I told this story to my friend François Lachance in Toronto, who wrote part of his PhD dissertation on McLuhan. The first thing he asked was: “Why didn’t the Marines just take a photograph of the sign”? It was as if they’d forgotten that writing is a visual artifact, and a camera is a photocopier.

Later, I showed my photograph of the sign to an Afghan scholar in Toronto—who is fluent in Pashto, Dari and Urdu—to see what she could make of it. I had already been told a few different things about the language of the sign, including that part of it was written in what looked like Urdu script, a language of Pakistan, from whence many Taliban hail. As it turns out, the sign is written in a kind of corrupted rural Pashto dialect by someone who had learned reading and writing outside the formal education system, probably at a madrasa (the village, or non-official, schools run by the mullahs, the religious preachers). Nor is the script an official Pashto, Dari or Urdu script, but some kind of variant created at the madrasas. Yet, however eccentric the writing may be, it is still a radical move from non-literacy. And as McLuhan repeats over and over again, the experience of phonetic literacy (like the Roman and Greek and Arabic alphabets) is a fundamental characteristic of those who possess literacy. So, however different we may be from whoever wrote that sign, the fact we share literacy at all is a more important commonality than that for which we might give credit.

The local nature of the writing on the sign meant that it would be nearly impossible for a native Dari speaker to accurately navigate. It would be something like a native English speaker with some formal education in French trying to decipher a French-based pidgin or creole like Haitian, or the language of the Labrador Inuit.

Here is a literal translation of the text:

Prohibited (prevent) for all,
If move from these holes (cavities or red points), her, him blood is at own hand (own neck). This prevention (blockade) point is going to the right side—then—if someone wanted to go, if arrested (captured) by Taliban, DO not have the rights to complain.

When you’ve heard enough foreign military yell in English in vain at locals, you get a pretty good idea of how little they appreciate language, let alone its correlative arts, translation and exegesis. Some of the Marines even thought the language of Afghanistan was Arabic (like in Iraq, where many of them had been previously deployed) so they couldn’t be expected to understand the differences between Dari and Pashto, or formal Pashto and a local dialect. They were able to identify the gist of the sign, and that was enough for them. But as a simple explication of the text shows, there was more to learn from the sign than meets the eye.

Works Cited

• Marshall McLuhan. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
• Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994.
• Louis Dupree. Afghanistan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
  Acknowledgment – The photographs in this series were produced as a part of the Basetrack Project. Basetrack is supported by a 2010 Newschallenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.   http://appghanistan.reviewcanada.ca/

Communication academic B. W. Powe discusses his former teacher, Canadian visionary Marshall MacLuhan.  In this “quickie”, Powe is given 7 minutes to explain why MacLuhan’s ideas were, and continue to be, so significant.

 

http://cdn.livestream.com/grid/LSPlayer.swf?channel=ideacity&clip=flv_b687185c-5c8a-4108-a6bf-0c7613347ae9&autoPlay=false ideacity on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

B.W. Powe is a Canadian writer of essays, poetry, novels, non-fiction and literary criticism. His areas of specialization include modernism, contemporary literature, and the ideas of his former teachers Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. Pico Iyer said of his work that it represents “a soaring alchemical vision”.

Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Powe attended York University, where he received a BA in English. He went on to earn a Master’s degree from the University of Toronto, where he worked with the great thinkers Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. He got his PhD from York University in 2009, and became a tenured professor there in 2010, teaching in the department of English.

Powe has written numerous books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction and writes regularly for the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. His work has also been featured in the New York Times and on CBC, CTV, CityTV and Bravo.  http://tinyurl.com/7nqjdrj

“THE CROSSROADS OF THE WORD”
MANHATTAN COLLEGE
JUNE 7-10. 2012

[ Thursday ][ Friday ][ Saturday ][ Sunday ]

Thursday, June 7 Schedule Only – follow the link at bottom for the complete schedule

10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.                       Registration/Coffee

12:00-12:30 p.m.                                Opening ceremony

Welcoming remarks from:
Thom Gencarelli, MEA Vice President and Convention Coordinator
Brennan O’Donnell, Ph.D., President of Manhattan College
Richard Emmerson, Ph.D., Dean, School of Arts, Manhattan College
James C. Morrison, MEA President

12:45-2:00 p.m.                                  Session 1.1

1.1.1

Crossing into Crosswords: Experiencing the Ludic Turn and the Gamification of Everyday Life

Chair: Liel Leibovitz, New York University

Panelists: James Hodges, New York University
                Holly Robbins, New York University
                Kimberly Thompson-Almanzor. New York University
                Maxwell Foxman, New York University
                Michelle C Forelle, New York University

This roundtable discussion explores how games and play elements have been increasingly incorporated into the daily activities and practices of American life.  While play has become not only a new means of advertising, but also of education, science, technological innovation, and countless other subjects, this roundtable hopes to show not only the prevalence of these game elements, but also the effects of game elements, for both good and ill, as we cross into a new age defined by play.

1.1.2

The Ecology of Social Media

Chair: TBA

“Status Update: Neil Postman on the Amusements of Facebook”
Jill Baszczynski, Medaille College
“First Person Paparazzi: Why Social Media Should be Studied More Like Video Games”
Angela M. Cirucci, Temple University
“The Emerging Importance of the E-book and Its Impact on Publishing”
Judith Dyck, University of Alberta
Teresa Sturgess, University of Alberta 
“The Network is the Narcotic: The Application of Marshall McLuhan’s Narcissus Narcosis to Social Networking Websites”
Abby Selden, Belmont University

1.1.3

Media Ecology and Consumer Culture: Extensions into Cultural Studies

Chair: TBA

“Buying the Best of Times: Banana Republic and Remembering the 1960s
Rebecca Kern, Manhattan College
“The Expanding Christian Marketplace: If You Can Name it or Make it the Christian Marketplace Probably Sells It”
Peter A. Maresco, Sacred Heart University
“Gold Bricks: Dirt, Mud, and Excrement in the Great Chainstore of Being”
Read M. Schuchardt, Wheaton College
“Electronic Media and the American Consumer”
Alexandra Wells, New York University

1.1.4

At the Crossroads of Disciplines and the Academy

Chair: TBA

“The Media Ecology of Citizen Engagement: What Public Intellectuals Do”
Marco Adria, University of Alberta
“Crosswords @ the Crossroads: Media Ecology and Management, Ong and Malone, McLuhans and Moore!”
Fred Cheyunski, Consultant
“Can Intersections between ‘Intermediality’ and Media Ecology Breed New Interdisciplinary Interactions?”
Jean-François Vallée, Université de Montréal
“The Advantages of Interdisciplinarity in Media Ecological Work – a Personal Experience”
David Zweig, Writer

2:15-3:30 p.m.                                    Session 1.2

1.2.1

Word from your TV: Future Prospects for Screen Media

Chair: Lewis Freeman, Fordham University

Panelists: Ashley Fenwick-Naditch, Children’s Media Consultants
    Fran Blumberg, Fordham University
    Jennifer Lavalle, Harvard Graduate School of Education
    Lance Strate, Fordham University
    Alice Kahn, Cartoon Network
    Douglas Rushkoff, The New School
    Lewis Freeman, Fordham University

Recommendations that have emerged from our work focus on the potential for screen media to provide feedback to children and caregivers about their uses of screen media (e.g., time spent watching, messages that appear at intervals tied to time or content, viewing logs/diaries, gaming based on screen content, etc.) and on “talking back” (e.g., through rating systems, interaction with other viewers or fans, online communities for discussion, etc.).  This panel will explore some of these recommendations and address potential benefits and drawbacks of various technologies for enhancing children’s screen media experiences.

1.2.2

Re-conceiving Media in the 21st Century

Chair: Laura Tropp, Marymount Manhattan College

“Film Portrayal of Nannies and the Nuclear Family”
Jaimie Sarubbi, Marymount Manhattan College
“Mobile (Smart) Phones: The Reinvention of the Ideal Teenage Experience”
Howard Rapp, Marymount Manhattan College
“The Relationship between TV and its User: Making TV an Event Again”
Colin Burridge, Marymount Manhattan College

These student papers explore different types of media and technology that have the power to change conceptions of audience and family.  One paper studies the film portrayal of nannies and the way this influences modern-day perceptions of the role of family, particularly the nuclear family.  Another paper explores the way modern cellphone use among teenagers is changing our conception of family structure and hierarchy.  The final paper explores how television technology is shifting control and viewership patterns.

1.2.3

Mobility and the Screen World

Chair: TBA

“Addled Subjectivity and Mobile Devices”
Linda Cooper Berdayes, Barry University
“The Virtualizing of the Word: ‘Isn’t It Nice to Have a Computer That Will Talk to You?’”
Paul Grosswiler, University of Maine 
“The iPhone and Hypersociality”

Dong-Hoo Lee, University of Incheon

“When Flirting Goes Too Far: The Ethics of Sexting” 
Brett Lunceford, University of South Alabama

1.2.4

New Media Meets Old Meets New

Chair: TBA

“How the Social Network Perpetuates Grudges: Facebook as a Faulty Platform for Forgiveness”
Becky Banks, New York University 
“Hoarding the Ethereal: How We Have More Things (and More Problems) but with Less Clutter”
Gayle Gatchalian, New York University
“The Origins of ‘Slow Media’: Early Diffusion of a Cultural Innovation through New Subcultures of Media Avoidance and Resistance”
Jennifer Rauch, Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus

3:45-5:00 p.m.                                    Session 1.3

1.3.1

Pornography @ the Crossroads

Chair: Salvatore J. Fallica, New York University

“Going All The Way: The Pornographication of the Public Sphere”
Jenn Hyland, The New School for Social Research
“Short Songs, Short Skirts: Punk and Porn in the 21st Century”
Kelly Aiken, New York University
“Alternate Identities: Women, Sexuality and Altporn”
Paige MacGregor, New York University

Respondent: Salvatore J. Fallica, New York University

This panel focuses on the social and cultural practices in modern genres of pornography made possible by technological developments of the digital age.  These new social and cultural practices help to provide insight into contemporary sexuality and myriad forms of representation.

1.3.2

Media Ecology in Narrative Analysis

Chair: Michael Grabowski, Manhattan College

“Stanley Kubrick: Photography and Cinema” 
Ashley Choi, Manhattan College
“Narrative Structures as Branding Tools: A Content Analysis of Showtime and HBO” 
Robert Colaianni, Manhattan College
“Re-sacralization in Post-9/11 Gothic Television” 
Amanda Ferrarotto. Manhattan College
“Dario Argento: A Cinema of Attractions Filmmaker” 
Jason Kalmanowitz, Manhattan College

1.3.3

Music, Music, Music…and Media

Chair: TBA

“Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland: A Media Ecological Perspective on the Intersection of Vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, and the Immigrant Experience”
Robert Albrecht, Jersey City State University
“Bjork’s Biophilia: Beyond Music and Video”
Peter W. Goodman, Hofstra University 
“Pink Floyd’s The Wall: The Import of Mimesis for Media Ecology”
Phil Rose, York University

1.3.4

The Media Ecology of the City

Chair: TBA

“New York: Capital of the 21st Century”
Jenny Batlay, Columbia University
“Global Migration and The City Onscreen”
Marcelline Block, Princeton University
“Imagistic Gateways in a Transnational City: ‘How Philly Moves’ and Hyperlocal Media Strategies”
Cailtin Bruce, Northwestern University
“Subway Environment”
Janice Caiafa, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
“Converging Flows: Transnational Identity, Capital, and Migration in Chinatown”
Jonathan Zalman, New York University

5:30-6:30 p.m.                                    Featured Speaker: Sherry Turkle

Moderator: Douglas Rushkoff

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Founder and current Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.  A psychoanalytically-trained sociologist and psychologist, Prof. Turkle is the author of, among her other works,The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon and Schuster, 1984 and the 20th Anniversary Edition from MIT Press, 2005), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon and Schuster, 1995), and her most recent book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011).  Profiles of Prof. Turkle have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Scientific American, and Wired Magazine, and she has been named “Woman of the Year” by Ms. Magazine.  She has also been featured as a media commentator on the social and psychological effects of technology for CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, the BBC, and NPR – including appearances on such programs as Nightline, Frontline, 20/20, and The Colbert Report.
                                                                                                                                              
6:30-7:30 p.m.                                    Cocktail Reception

 

See the full program schedule here: http://tinyurl.com/d34ozv9

Registration & complete convention information here: http://tinyurl.com/6t4kylp

Lyon, May 9, 2012 (SIGNIS) – Pierre Babin is no longer with us. The Founder of CREC and pioneer of the “Symbolic Way” died on 9th May 2012. He goes to the Christ that he strived to bring to all. We remember him as a man of faith, open, convivial and above all a communicator. To be in his company was to experience “the good life” not only for good wine but above all for his warmth…

In 2011, Pierre Babin received the McLuhan prize for the work of a lifetime

A pioneer of group media, an expert in educational psychology, writer and essayist, Pierre Babin was born in 1925 at Paray-le-Monial, France. He entered the Congregation of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI) in 1942 and was ordained a priest seven years later. He studied theology at the Catholic University of Lyon. Among his teachers there was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He specialized in the relationship between theology and psychology. From 1955, Babin became a professor at the Catholic University of Lyon and then at Paris, Strasbourg, Ottawa and Montreal. In 1971 he founded the Centre for Research and Education in Communication (CREC, www.crecinternational.org) in Lyon, specializing in media training and communication, mainly serving Christian institutions. He published many articles and books that incorporated diverse influences, such as those of Joseph Columb and Marshall McLuhan. In his book L’Ere de la communication (1985) (translated as The New Era in Religious Communication, 1991) Babin showed how to combine media communication and religious calling. He opted for the supremacy of the image (in the broadest sense, incorporating symbol, intuition, music and sound) above any form of “oral” communication. For him, audiovisual language was more than just a simple educational tool used to convey the message of faith. The result was the “Symbolic Way” which, more than a learning method, referred to a state of mind, a new way of understanding realities and cultures.

From the 1980s, Pierre Babin worked with St. John’s University, Bangkok. In 2002, the University awarded him the title of Doctor Honoris Causa. After retiring from Crec Avex in February 2008, Babin became professor and honorary research fellow at the Faculty of Communication Arts at St. John’s University. In September 2008, the University opened the Babin Centre for Communications, which has the task of providing a programme of training and research based on the legacy and vision of Babin. His method and his research has increasingly been the subject of study within the International Group for Faith and Technology (GIFT). In August 2011, Babin received the McLuhan Prize for, named after one of his mentors.

From the 1970s, Babin had close links with OCIC and Unda and with their merger in 2001, with SIGNIS and participated in meetings and projects. Over more than 30 years, Pierre and his “Symbolic Way” taught through CREC, influenced, formed and mentored hundreds of Catholic communicators many of whom are currently very active in the SIGNIS network. His death was met with great sadness in SIGNIS where his legacy as a pioneer in Catholic communications lives on.

Here are some immediate reactions received in the Secretariat from the President Augustine Loorthusamy and from Vice president Peter Thomas:

Augustine Loorthusamy: “(Pierre) was a giant in his field and more than that was a prophet. He was directly responsible for my getting into the world of Media. For more than 30 years he has been a great influence in my life. He was a mentor and a friend.”

Peter Thomas: “There is no doubt in my mind that Babin has been the Marshal McLuhan of Catholic media. I can still feel the media ’vibrations’ as I sit here in an edit suite watching ten large screens. He was a great pioneer in the use of audio visuals for catechetical purposes and a profound influence on my thinking in the decade of the 1980’s”.

You can publish your own condolences and testimonies on the CREC website at www.crecinternational.org. At the end of the obituary, there is a link to write comments

You can also download from the CREC site a document (in French) presenting Pierre Babin’s journey:www.crecinternational.org/new/index.php/babinvoie     http://tinyurl.com/bvmfjv5

This installation was part of McLuhan100 at the International Festival Of Authors (Toronto) last year; unfortunately I missed it with so many McLuhan-related events going on……AlexK

McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. War and Peace in the Global Village. Toronto: Penguin Books, 2003.

Marshall McLuhan taught us that media environments are so pervasive that we find it difficult to do anything but unconsciously habituate ourselves to them. It is as if, since Gutenberg and the dissemination of printed matter, we have been constantly using books but are unable to really see them. But when a medium starts to lose its monopoly over us, latent qualities come to the fore. Following McLuhan’s prescient examination of reading and its contemporary transformations, this installation hopes to foreground the book in its totality as a sensuous object, with materials, patterns, and dispositions telling tales that are as in need of their own reading as any other narrative.

By Reg Beatty and Francis Mariani

Reg Beatty is a bookbinder and book artist living in Toronto. He teaches book design at York University and book arts at OCAD U.

Francis Mariani is a photographer and web designer living in Toronto.

See more photo examples of books at http://endinginabook.designwallah.com/case4/ .

Howard Gossage was the San Francisco advertising innovator, sometimes referred to as the “Socrates of San Francisco,” who introduced and promoted Marshall McLuhan in media and intellectual circles in San Francisco and New York in the mid-’60s. You can read about him in Philip Marchand’s biography of McLuhan, pp. 182-183 and in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Gossage .

Review: Steve Harrison – Changing the world is the only fit work for a grown man

Tim Lindsay reviews Steve Harrison’s book, ‘An eyewitness account of the life and times of Howard Luck Gossage.’

Advertising books are like buses; none for ages and then three come along at once.  Following on from ‘Hegarty on Advertising’ and Andrew Cracknell’s ‘the Real Madmen’ comes this intriguing and essential account of the life and times of Howard Luck Gossage.  

I know you’re busy but I’m afraid you’re going to have to read it.

Most of us in this great business of ours – certainly those of us of a certain age – can give a roughly accurate account of the creative revolutions in advertising and design that occurred first in New York, then in London, in the 50’s and 60’s. Bill Bernach and his agency loom large, as do George Lois, Julian Koenig, Jerry Della Femina, Bob Gill, Terence Conran, Colin Millward, Alan Parker, Ridley Scott, Hugh Hudson, David Puttnam, Colin Fletcher and many more.  

You’ll have your own list.

What Steve Harrison has done is bring someone else to our attention – someone who I suspect most of us either haven’t heard of, or know very little about. Steve calls Gossage ‘1960’s America’s most innovative, influential and irreverent advertising genius’.   

Really? That’s some billing. What did this guy do?

He did some amazing stuff. Allow me to quote the dust jacket. This is the story of a man who ‘set out to reinvent advertising and then change the world.…he introduced interactive, PR-generating stunts and social media…saved the Grand Canyon and kick-started the Green Movement…launched Wired magazine’s patron saint….and all with a flamboyance that inspired the likes of Tom Wolfe, John Steinbeck and the makers of the counterculture’. 

Incredibly he did all this from a base in what was then an advertising backwater – San Francisco. His agency was never big and after a while he got bored with working for commercial clients and turned his talent and energy to the kind of work described in the uncompromised and Gossage-like title of the book – changing the world.

But before we get to that, what were the ads like?   

Well, they were pretty much all print, and mostly ran in the New Yorker magazine.  They were for products that Gossage himself liked, and written only for an audience with which he felt he could identify.  He didn’t do campaigns, preferring to write an ad, run it and then write another one based on the feedback.  And there nearly always was feedback; the ads mostly had coupons even if there wasn’t an offer attached.  

Gossage liked to know how folks felt about things.

So; feedback loops, embryonic communities built around products and services, ‘parallel structures’ instead of Mad Av’s painfully direct approach and some almost surreal (and very modern) ideas; He invented ‘pink asphalt’ and ‘pink air’ for Fina, a paper aeroplane competition for Scientific American, a competition to win a kangaroo for Qantas. This was a long way from Rosser Reeves (with whom Gossage had numerous spats, public and private) and his USP. 

Then he really got going.  

He read a book called ‘Understanding Media; the Extensions of Man’; loved it because it articulated his own beliefs; rang the author, an obscure Canadian academic, in the middle of the night and ‘launched’ him, like a new product, to a young America in the midst of a social, sexual and cultural revolution. The audience embraced this new messiah of the media age with religious fervour.   

The academic was Marshall McLuhan.  

He got involved with a campaign that prevented the flooding of the Grand Canyon by the power companies, supporting and inspiring the movement’s leader, David Brower, and casually christening Brower’s grassroots activist organisation.  

The organisation is called ‘Friends of the Earth’. 

He was involved with Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters and the LSD experiments that eventually became Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test’. His agency, the Firehouse, was used as a safe-house and meeting place for people who became heroes of the counterculture.   

The events that were planned there are known to us as the Summer of Love. 

He did all this and much, much more with an enthusiasm, a love of life and a boundless curiosity about people and how the world worked, inspiring love and loyalty in nearly everyone around him. 

Then at the age of 51 he got leukaemia.   Read the rest at http://tinyurl.com/cvfkcxc .

You can read Gossage’s essay “Understanding Marshall McLuhan” here: http://tinyurl.com/cj7ljbd

JOINT DOCTORATE IN COMMUNICATION CELEBRATES 25 YEARS WITH SPECIAL MCLUHAN EVENT

The Université de Montreal (UdeM), Université de Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and Concordia celebrated the 25th anniversary of their Joint Doctorate in Communication with a special event held recently at the Société des arts technologiques (SAT).

Entitled Innis, McLuhan, and the Media: Path to Enlightenment or Dead End?, the event brought together communication professors and students to discuss the legacy of two Canadian pioneers of communication studies: Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. The invited speakers were asked to examine the relevance of their work “against the backdrop of a media landscape that is transforming itself before our eyes.”

The first session of the event, entitled Decoupling Innis and McLuhan?, featured three presentations that re-examined the connection between the two scholars and their communication theories. One of the invited speakers was Luiz Martino, a professor from the Faculty of Communications at the University of Brasilia in Brazil. William (Bill) Buxton, Concordia’s director of the joint PhD program, also presented his paper, entitled The Rise of McLuhanism, The Loss of Innis-sense.

“Innis and McLuhan are seen as a tandem, representing the core of what’s called the Toronto School of Communication,” Buxton explained. “McLuhan gained a lot of prominence, and then the connection to Innis was less clear at that point. So it was really trying to restore the balance.”
 
The second session, entitled Probing McLuhan, focused the spotlight on the celebrated media theorist famous for coining the saying, “the medium is the message.” The session featured three more presentations, including one by Darren Wershler, Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature in Concordia’s Department of English, entitled Marshall McLuhan and the Economies of Citation.

PhD candidate Christina Haralanova

Wershler’s presentation examined McLuhan’s poetic approach to writing, and his decidedly non-academic approach to citations in his work. The session’s respondent was Concordia PhD candidate Christina Haralanova.

The SAT’s new Satosphere dome was full for the event’s keynote address by Harvard Professor Jeffrey T. Schnapp, presented along with a three-dimensional projection by UdeM design professor Luc Courchesne. Both the lecture and the projection addressed the wildly popular, experimental book by McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore, coordinated by Jerome Agel, called The Media is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, published in 1967.

Schnapp said he was delighted to find out he would be presenting his lecture in the Satosphere while the book’s images and texts were swirling overhead. Upon seeing the space and Courchesne’s projection, Schnapp said he decided to abandon his written lecture in favour of an improvised presentation. “It seemed to me it would be really perverse to have a traditional lecture in a space where you could have precisely the kind of deeply defamiliarizing experience of a print artifact that you could have in the Satosphere,” he said.

Following the presentation, guests gathered in the expansive Espace SAT to enjoy some refreshments and discuss the day’s events. “I think the keynote was really good, well made and interesting,” said Haralanova, who has just finished her PhD forum, and will soon begin working on her thesis proposal in which she plans to examine “hacker spaces, feminism, social justice, and the media.”

Haralanova praised the joint PhD program, saying it has exposed her to many different approaches to communication studies. “We gain a lot from having the possibility of knowing different professors from different universities,” she said. “My doctoral forum was with students from the three universities, and this experience has been very rich for me.”   http://tinyurl.com/89n48f3

What a Monday Night Seminar looked like back in 1973

As Marshall McLuhan foresaw, the expanding ubiquity of digital media is reshaping the very fabric of society. What matters are not the (so-often fetishized) technologies, digital and social media, patterns of communication, and effects of information on society. What matters are the ways we respond. How will we fashion discourse, community, culture, authority & expertise? What will be the cartographies of learning, responsibility, and compassion in this digitally mediated landscape? What will happen to learning, to inquiry, to critical intellectual debate? Will it continue to be subserved by the university?

Join the Coach House Institute for the second in a series of Monday Night Seminars for Spring 2012. Tonight’s theme – ‘Digital Technologies and the Life of The Mind’. Pre-read attached.

Discussants:

* Brian Cantwell Smith (Director, Coach House Institute);

* Robert Gibbs (Director, Jackman Humanities Institute, UofT).

* Probe: Carolyn Taylor (Masters student, Elliot Allen Institute of Theology and Ecology, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto)

The Monday Night Seminar series is an ongoing event offered by the Faculty of Information McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto running until Winter/Spring 2013. It invites intellectuals, (re)searchers, artists, practitioners and cultural activists to convene and engage in intellectual dialogues from edgy seminars to intense conversations, to imagine how we can exploit our familiarity with digital media and harness the technologies of change to unleash a vibrant future for profound, discontinuous, soul-redefining encounters.

Read pdf – Digital tech & the Life of the Mind

Dr. Brian Cantwell-Smith

A series of blogposts on Marshall McLuhan by McLuhan enthusiast Cooper Zale, who blogs as “Lefty Parent” at http://www.leftyparent.com/blog/ . Click on the links to access individual blog postings…..AlexK

© The Estate of Yousuf Karsh. All Rights Reserved

One of my life’s “gurus” is media philosopher Marshall McLuhan who believed that we humans were profoundly impacted (mostly below the level of conscious awareness) by our communication technology. His mantra was “the medium is the message” and he also came up with the term “global village”.

Mud Wrestling with Marshall McLuhan – Part 1 of a 3 part series giving an overview of McLuhan’s ideas based on his 1969 Playboy magazine interview.

Mud Wrestling with McLuhan Part 2 – Retribalization – Focusing in on McLuhan’s ideas about electronic media initiating a “retribalization” of human society.

Mud Wrestling with McLuhan Part 3 – Youth & Education – McLuhan’s critique of our education system, still stuck in a paradigm of industrialism and print media.

The Mechanical Bride – McLuhan’s analysis of U.S. culture in the 1950s based on looking thru the lens of its popular media, particularly advertisements and comics.

Retribalized by my Life’s Soundtrack: “Downtown” – Based on McLuhan’s ideas, looking at how electronic media, particularly popular music on the radio has impacted my life.

Tales of a Retribalized Knowledge Work in the Egalitarian Information Age – How my work environment has been totally transformed by electronic media from my parents’ generation.   http://tinyurl.com/82oee8x

GOOD NEWS for any who missed Eric McLuhan’s talk on April 20 on Egyptian art. it will be repeated on Monday, April 30

from 5pm to 6pm at the Arts & Letters Club of Toronto in the third floor Studio. Please inform Margaret Logan ( margloga@gmail.com ) know if you are coming so that she can prepare the handouts.           

Eric will present to us the world’s first moving images, which date back to 3200 BC during the reign of the Egyptian dynasty. Eric will present a series of images, all created in the Egyptian “canonical style,” and show you how they work. With a little (guided) practice you will be able to see them move yourself. Once familiar with this stage, you can see them turn from movement into the most amazing 3D images you never saw before. Eric has been working on these perceptions and ideas over the last three decades; with his guidance, we will make the leap into hyperspace! All are welcome, especially artists and new media specialists. However, space is limited so please express your interest in attending by RSVP to Margaret Logan margloga@gmail.com    

The Arts and Letters Club has dinner on Monday nights at 6:30 pm. Price $23. If you would like to stay for dinner, please RSVP to Margaret Logan margloga@gmail.com  by noon latest on Monday or you can call the Club directly to book your dinner with Naomi Hunter 416-597-0223 ext. 3. This is a plated dinner so the kitchen needs to know how many to expect.

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Director Allison de Fren’s indie documentary The Mechanical Bride smartly dissects male desire and sexy fembots of the past, present and future.

New documentary The Mechanical Bride is a moving, weirdly human exploration of artificial companionship. It’s also an academic dissection of the male gaze and pop culture’s sexbots, from Metropolis and Battlestar Galactica to actual robotic love objects.

The title of the documentary is borrowed from Marshall McLuhan’s 1951 book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, which studied “the cultural interfusion of sex and technology in the advertising strategies of his day,” director Allison de Fren told Wired in an e-mail interview. “What would he say about our nostalgic fixation with Mad Men? McLuhan would have a field day with the mechanical brides of our time.”

The Mechanical Bride, which screens Sunday at Canada’s international documentary festival Hot Docs, takes a long look at artificial creations like the RealDoll, a posable sex doll with silicone skin, as well as the technosexuals who love them. (Check out Wired’s array of artificial companions in the gallery above and see exclusive clips from The Mechanical Bride below.)

The HotDocs schedule of screenings can be found here: http://www.hotdocs.ca/

“Love and Sex With Robots predicts that within only a half-century, sexual intimacy between humans and their robot companions will be so commonplace that society will need to address the issues around robot prostitution.”  http://tinyurl.com/cvevnad

The International Journal of McLuhan Studies seeks contributions for each monograph issue, embracing different theoretical and methodological approaches, to review McLuhan’s critical thought as represented in his lectures and writings. The aim of the Journal is to open a dialogue between academics, researchers, teachers, artists and business people, in order to relate the contributions of Marshall McLuhan to contemporary questions focused on issues of production, co‐production and the consumption of media, intelligence, education, memory, identity, desire, art, design, collaboration and technology in the society of knowledge.

Spring   ‐   Summer 2012, Issue 2

 Education Overload – From Total Surround to Pattern Recognition

Streams: Alternative learning environment, collaborative learning, digital natives, educational computing, educational gaming, educational media ecology, edupunk, edutainment, e-portfolios, e-readers & iPads, figure-ground analysis, invisible learning, digital literacy, learning analytics, learning biologies, learning interfaces, learning economies, massive online open courses (MOOC), new pedagogies, social-media driven education, tertiary orality, training of perception, Web learning, wiki culture.  

Call for papers:

The United Nations General Assembly in 2002 declared the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development: a ten‐year period from 2005 to 2014 in which it is increasingly evident that education, culture and the way children are brought up form the keys for peaceful co‐existence and a sustainable future.

Education was one of the central concerns of McLuhan’s work. Marchessault (2008) writes that McLuhan’s total body of work expresses “deeply and consistently pedagogical project” (p. 4). The two volumes Report on Project in Understanding New Media (1960), commissioned by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, and The City as Classroom: understanding Language and Media (1977) open a wide perspective on education, pedagogy and media in the Electronic Era. .

Marshall McLuhan’s ideas on education and learning were proposed in lectures and writings, mainly during the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. Harshly critical of the “place‐based, book‐paced” educational practices of the time, McLuhan offered a compelling vision of learning to replace lectures with active student participation, interaction and involvement, engaging learners in discovery learning, rather than pre‐packaged teacher and textbook‐delivered content to be regurgitated on tests. His vision of “classrooms without walls” included a transition from hardware to software, redefinition of teacher roles, elimination of subjects, reform of assessment, and the use of instructional media, not just books. The curriculum would focus on media literacy and include the training of perception through figure/ground analysis and the inclusion of arts education. Noting the trend toward “learning a living”, the constant upgrading of knowledge and skills by professional workers, he anticipated today’s emphasis on lifelong learning and workplace training. If McLuhan’s writings and lectures on media anticipate the Internet, social media and global consciousness, his work on education and learning anticipates today’s use of instructional media, online, collaborative and experiential learning, constructivism, as well‐as lifelong learning and other current trends in education. He noted in 1967 that: “the little red schoolhouse is already well on its way toward becoming the little round schoolhouse” foreshadowing the arrival of the most powerful learning platform yet devised – the Internet. Traditional classrooms and the global village would give way to a global “classroom without walls”.*

Contemporary society is presently facing a situation of “education overload”, in which the information environment outside of schools is far richer than that inside of schools, in which virtual environments offer a multifaceted and complex dimension for learning practices, in which people suffer the limits, and benefit of the possibilities of this “total surround” of information and knowledge. In this scenario traditional pedagogies no longer suffice for a world that calls for new visions, tools and skills for training in perception and pattern recognition.

The International Journal of McLuhan Studies invites the submission of full papers related to these themes (8000 words maximum, references not included). All submitted papers will be refereed and the authors of those accepted will be notified, accompanied by revision suggestions where necessary, and asked to submit a camera ready version to be published in Issue 2 of IJMS.

Deadline for full paper submissions: June 3, 2012

 First step: double blind peer review

‐ Full paper submission, maximum 8000 words, references not included

‐ Submission opens April 30th and close June 3, 2012

‐ Papers must be electronically submitted according to the guidelines published on the website (www.mcluhanstudies.com)

Second Step:

‐ Papers accepted will receive detailed feedback and suggestions for revision, where necessary, to be taken into consideration before submission of the camera‐ready version for publication in the Journal

‐ Every accepted paper requires proofreading by a proof reader of the mother tongue.

Some Marshall McLuhan probes and ideas on education and learning:

“The business of school is no longer instruction but discovery. And the business of the teaching establishment is to train perception upon the outer environment instead of merely stenciling information upon the brain pans of children inside the environment.”

“The goal of science and the arts and of education for the next generation must be to decipher not the genetic but the perceptual code. In a global information environment, the old pattern of education in answer finding is of no avail; one is surrounded by answers, millions of them, moving and mutating at electric speed. Survival and control will depend on the ability to probe and to question in the proper way and place. As the information that constitutes the environment is perpetually in flux, so the need is not for fixed concepts but rather for the ancient skill of reading that book, for navigating through an ever uncharted and unchartable milieu. Else we will have no more control of this technology and environment than we have of the wind and the tides”.

“What is indicated for the new learning procedures is not the absorption of classified and fragmented data, but pattern recognition with all that that implies of grasping relationships (…) We seem to be approaching the age when we shall program the environment instead of the curriculum.”

“There is no kind of problem that baffles one or a dozen experts that cannot be solved at once by a million minds that are given a chancesimultaneously to tackle a problem. The satisfaction of individual prestige, which we formerly derived from the possession of expertise, must now yield to the much greater satisfactions of dialogue and group discovery. The task yields to the task force.” 

…continue online at www.mcluhanstudies.com        

 

_________________________ *References: 

Marchessault, J. (2008, May). McLuhan’s pedagogical art. Flusser Studies 05. Retrieved from http://www.flusserstudies.net/pag/06/marchessault‐pedagogical.pdf                                                        

McLuhan, H.M. (1960, June 30). Report on project in understanding new media. Washington, DC: National Association of Educational Broadcasters. 

McLuhan, M., & Leonard G.B. (1967, February 21). The future of education: The class of 1989, LOOK Magazine. pp. 23-25.  

McLuhan, M., Hutchon, K., & McLuhan, E. (1977). City as classroom: Understanding language and media. Agincourt, ON: Book Society of Canada. 

This historic plaque at 6 Joseph Street, also designated as “Marshall McLuhan Way,” was unveiled on October 14, 2011 on the campus of St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, during the centenary year of Marshall McLuhan’s birth.

Description: Located at 6 St. Joseph Street in Toronto, this plaque is about University of Toronto professor Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan was known worldwide for his theories and new concepts regarding the media, technology and communication. McLuhan is also credited with coining such memorable phrases as the “global village” and “the medium is the message”. http://tinyurl.com/8a46s2c

The text on the plaque reads in English:
A pioneer of media studies, this University of Toronto professor became famous in the 1960s for his provocative theories about the impact of print and electronic media on human perception and behaviour. Teaching literary criticism led him to the idea that meaning was shaped by the technology of communication. His innovative work probed the influence of the printed word on society, the effects of combining print and images in advertising, and the world-wide impact of radio and television. The concepts of the ” global village” and “the medium is the message” made McLuhan one of the most celebrated scholars in the Western world.

MONDAY, APR 23, 2012

Post-literate media The more data we collect via Google, YouTube and Facebook, the less likely we are to understand what it means   -   BY LEWIS LAPHAM This originally appeared on TomDispatch.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse. 
– Emperor Charles V

But in which language does one speak to a machine, and what can be expected by way of response? The questions arise from the accelerating data-streams out of which we’ve learned to draw the breath of life, posed in consultation with the equipment that scans the flesh and tracks the spirit, cues the ATM, the GPS and the EKG, arranges the assignations on Match.com and the high-frequency trades at Goldman Sachs, catalogs the pornography and drives the car, tells us how and when and where to connect the dots and thus recognize ourselves as human beings.

Why then does it come to pass that the more data we collect — from Google, YouTube and Facebook — the less likely we are to know what it means?

The conundrum is in line with the late Marshall McLuhan’s noticing 50 years ago the presence of “an acoustic world,” one with “no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections, no stasis,” a new “information environment of which humanity has no experience whatever.” He published “Understanding Media” in 1964, proceeding from the premise that “we become what we behold,” that “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

Media were to be understood as “make-happen agents” rather than as “make-aware agents,” not as art or philosophy but as systems comparable to roads and waterfalls and sewers. Content follows form; new means of communication give rise to new structures of feeling and thought.

To account for the transference of the idioms of print to those of the electronic media, McLuhan examined two technological revolutions that overturned the epistemological status quo. First, in the mid-15th century, Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type, which deconstructed the illuminated wisdom preserved on manuscript in monasteries, encouraged people to organize their perceptions of the world along the straight lines of the printed page. Second, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the applications of electricity (telegraph, telephone, radio, movie camera, television screen, eventually the computer), favored a sensibility that runs in circles, compressing or eliminating the dimensions of space and time, narrative dissolving into montage, the word replaced with the icon and the rebus.

Within a year of its publication, “Understanding Media” acquired the standing of Holy Scripture and made of its author the foremost oracle of the age. The New York Herald Tribune proclaimed him “the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov.” Although never at a loss for Delphic aphorism — “The electric light is pure information”; “In the electric age, we wear all mankind as our skin” — McLuhan assumed that he had done nothing more than look into the window of the future at what was both obvious and certain.

Floating the Fiction of Democracy

In 1964 I was slow to take the point, possibly because I was working at the time in a medium that McLuhan had listed as endangered — writing, for The Saturday Evening Post, inclined to think in sentences, accustomed to associating a cause with an effect, a beginning with a middle and an end. Television news I construed as an attempt to tell a story with an alphabet of brightly colored children’s blocks, and when offered the chance to become a correspondent for NBC, I declined the referral to what I regarded as a course in remedial reading.

The judgment was poorly timed. Within five years The Saturday Evening Post had gone the way of the great auk; news had become entertainment, entertainment news, the distinctions between a fiction and a fact as irrelevant as they were increasingly difficult to parse. Another 20 years and I understood what McLuhan meant by the phrase, “The medium is the message,” when in the writing of a television history of America’s foreign policy in the twentieth century, I was allotted roughly 73 seconds in which to account for the origins of World War II, while at the same time providing a voiceover transition between newsreel footage of Jesse Owens running the hundred-yard dash at the Berlin Olympics in the summer of 1936, and Adolf Hitler marching the Wehrmacht into Vienna in the spring of 1938.

McLuhan regarded the medium of television as better suited to the sale of a product than to the expression of a thought. The voice of the first person singular becomes incorporated into the collective surges of emotion housed within an artificial kingdom of wish and dream; the viewer’s participation in the insistent and ever-present promise of paradise regained greatly strengthens what McLuhan identified as “the huge educational enterprise that we call advertising.” By which he didn’t mean the education of a competently democratic citizenry — “Mosaic news is neither narrative, nor point of view, nor explanation, nor comment” — but rather as “the gathering and processing of exploitable social data” by “Madison Avenue frogmen of the mind” intent on retrieving the sunken subconscious treasure of human credulity and desire.

McLuhan died on New Year’s Eve 1979, 15 years before the weaving of the World Wide Web, but his concerns over the dehumanized extensions of man (a society in which it is the machine that thinks and the man who is reduced to the state of the thing) are consistent with those more recently noted by computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who suggests that the data-mining genius of the computer reduces individual human expression to “a primitive, retrograde activity.” Among the framers of the digital constitution, Lanier in the mid-1980s was a California computer engineer engaged in the early programming of virtual reality.

In the same way that McLuhan in his more optimistic projections of the electronic future had envisioned unified networks of communication restoring mankind to a state of freedom not unlike the one said to have existed in the Garden of Eden, so too Lanier had entertained the hope of limitless good news. Writing in 2010 in his book “You Are Not a Gadget,” he finds that the ideology promoting radical freedom on the surface of the Web is “more for machines than people” — machines that place advertising at the “center of the human universe… the only form of expression meriting general commercial protection in the new world to come. Any other form of expression to be remashed, anonymized and decontextualized to the point of meaninglessness.”

The reduction of individual human expression to a “primitive, retrograde activity” accounts for the product currently being sold under the labels of “election” and “democracy.” The candidates stand and serve as farm equipment meant to cultivate an opinion poll, their value measured by the cost of their manufacture; the news media’s expensive collection of talking heads bundles the derivatives into the commodity of market share. The steadily higher cost of floating the fiction of democracy — the sale of political television advertising up from nearly $200 million in the presidential election of 1996 to $2 billion in the election of 2008 — reflects the ever-increasing rarity of the demonstrable fact.

Like the music in elevators, the machine-made news comes and goes on a reassuringly familiar loop, the same footage, the same spokespeople, the same commentaries, what was said last week certain to be said this week, next week, and then again six weeks from now, the sequence returning as surely as the sun, demanding little else from the would-be citizen except devout observance. French Novelist Albert Camus in the 1950s already had remanded the predicament to an aphorism: “A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.”

Ritual becomes the form of applied knowledge that both McLuhan and Lanier define as pattern recognition — Nike is a sneaker or a cap, Miller beer is wet, Paris Hilton is not a golf ball. The making of countless connections in the course of a morning’s googling, an afternoon’s shopping, an evening’s tweeting constitutes the guarantee of being in the know. Among people who worship the objects of their own invention — money, cloud computing, the Super Bowl — the technology can be understood, in Swiss playwright Max Frisch’s phrase, as “the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” Better to consume it, best of all to buy it, and to the degree that information can be commodified (as corporate logo, designer dress, politician custom-fitted to a super PAC) the amassment of wealth and the acquisition of power follows from the labeling of things rather than from the making of them. Read the rets here: http://tinyurl.com/6oxpbg8

Lewis H. Lapham is Editor of Lapham’s Quarterly. Formerly Editor of Harper’s Magazine, he is the author of numerous books, including Money and Class in America, Theater of War, Gag Rule, and, most recently, Pretensions to Empire. The New York Times has likened him to H. L. Mencken; Vanity Fair has suggested a strong resemblance to Mark Twain; and Tom Wolfe has compared him to Montaigne. A native of San Francisco, Mr. Lapham was educated at Yale and Cambridge.

You are all invited to participate remotely to “The new sensorium: embodied perception, extensions of humanity and digital communication”

This International centenary Marshall McLuhan & Walter J. Ong symposium, 20-21 April 2012, BIOS, Athens, is organized by the Communication, Media and Culture dept, Panteion University & the McLuhan Technology and Society Program, Coach House Institute, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto.

Follow us on Ustream tomorrow Friday April 20 between 10:30 am and 6:30 pm (Eastern European Time) and Saturday April 21 between 10:30am and 3pm.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/10854335

For the full program, list of speakers and abstracts check: tp://entopia.org/newsensorium/

Hope you can join us via your tweets and screens!

Dominique   -   Director, McLuhan Program in Culture & Technology Coach House Institute, Faculty of Information University of Toronto

       McLuhan & Ong       

Marshall McLuhan Residence, City of Edmonton, Sustainable Development

Marshall McLuhan Residence

By Lawrence Herzog, Herzog on Heritage   |   April 16, 2012  

Herbert Marshall McLuhan predicted the World Wide Web nearly 30 years before it arrived, and coined the expressions “the medium is the message” and “the global village.” He was a leading and often controversial thinker on the universal impact of mass media. The arrival of the Internet helped sparked renewed interest in his work and perspective, long after his death in 1980.

Now, the Highlands house where McLuhan lived for a time as a boy is going to be preserved as an interpretive centre, library, and home for residency programs for artists and writers. City councillors voted on February 1st to provide the Edmonton Arts Council with $75,000 to purchase the property at 11342 64 Street NW.

The Craftsman-style bungalow was built in 1912 from plans drawn by Ernest William Morehouse and Arthur Nesbitt, architectural partners responsible for more than 30 houses in the early days of the Highlands. Their firm, Morehouse and Nesbitt, designed the mansions of William McGrath and Bidwell Holgate, founders of the district. Morehouse and Nesbitt also designed the Ash Residence, Chown Residence, Atkinson Residence, Highlands Methodist Church and the Gibbard Block on 112th Avenue, among others.

An assessment of the McLuhan Residence compiled in January by the City’s heritage planning department, reported that the historic integrity of the 100-year-old house is high. “The style is fairly typical of residences developed prior to World War I in Edmonton’s earliest neighbourhoods,” the report says. “The house is significant for having been the early boyhood home of Marshall McLuhan.”

Biographer W. Terrence Gordon writes that Marshall was the older of two boys born to Elsie Naomi Hall and Herbert Ernest McLuhan. His mother was a Baptist schoolteacher who later became an actress, and his father was a Methodist who worked as a real estate agent.

Marshall was born in Edmonton on July 21, 1911, shortly after the family arrived from Creighton, Alberta. His parents purchased a lot in the fledgling district in August 1912 and were granted a permit to build a $3,000 house on it.

Local contractors Bailey & Berry constructed the home. “In line with its Craftsman bungalow style, the McLuhan Residence appears almost rustic,” says a description written in 1993 by historical consultant Dorothy Field. “The exposed beams, cast concrete foundation, low pitched roof, and large front porch columns are typical of the style.”

With the coming of war and boom going bust in 1914, Herbert’s business failed, and he enlisted in the Canadian Army. He contracted influenza and was discharged in 1915. The family moved to Winnipeg that year, but retained ownership of the house until 1923. Gladys Griffiths, a teacher and assistant principal at Highlands School, then purchased it.

Griffiths sold the house in 1928 to her sister Julia May and husband Walter Husband, a salesman for the National Drug and Chemical Company. Husband’s brother Herbert owned the Highlands Drug Store in the Gibbard Block, from 1926 to 1944. Walter Husband sold the McLuhan Residence in 1956. Doug and Cheryl Toshack bought the house in 1974 and have owned it for 38 years.

Over the years, they’ve been visited by countless of the curious and scholarly. CBC even filmed part of a documentary on McLuhan at the house.

In a CBC Radio documentary aired in 1980, his brother Maurice talked about how Marshall was always interested in the latest technology, even as a small boy. They would huddle listening to the crystal radio set that Marshall had built.

Marshall McLuhan received a PhD from Cambridge in 1934, and taught English at various colleges in the United States before settling in to teach in Toronto in 1944. Even so, he maintained a strong connection with Edmonton and returned often.

The University of Alberta awarded McLuhan an honorary Doctor of Laws in 1971. 
He died in Toronto in 1980 at the age of 69. To mark the 100th anniversary of McLuhan’s birth in 2011, the University of Alberta hosted the Herbert Marshall McLuhan Edmonton Centenary.

“Professor McLuhan often commented that his upbringing in Western Canada provided a valuable alternative, or peripheral, perspective on the world,” says Dr. Marco Adria, director of the U of A’s Master of Arts in communications and technology program. “In his writings, he recalled experiences in Edmonton that were to shape his intellectual life.”

The Marshall McLuhan Residence was added to Edmonton’s Inventory of Historic Resources in 1993, acknowledging McLuhan’s accomplishments and connection to the Highlands neighbourhood and his birthplace. The new use for the property will recognize McLuhan’s connection to Edmonton and his place in history and modern culture.

The Edmonton Arts Council’s affiliate organization, Arts Habitat Association of Edmonton, is working on various business models to manage the residence. The proposal to make the house a destination for local, national and international writers and thinkers has the support from the University of Alberta, the Writers Guild of Alberta, the Highlands Historical Society and the Highlands Community League.

The City is also moving forward to designate the residence a Municipal Historic Resource. It’s a fitting 100th birthday present for a little house with a bigger connection to the cultural history of the “global village.”   http://tinyurl.com/dyctq54
Photo by Alex Kuskis

An Event celebrating 25 years of the Joint Ph.D. program in communication (Université de Montréal, Concordia University, UQAM)Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT), 1201, boul. St. Laurent, Montréal

On April 25th, we invite you to join us in celebrating 25 years of the Joint Ph.D. program in communication.  For that purpose, we invite you to a free one-afternoon symposium — held at the Société des Arts Technologiques — dedicated to the ideas of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan — whose one-hundredth birthday was celebrated last year. We will have two panels of three presentations each, featuring the works of our colleagues and students (see program hereafter), and a keynote address by Jeffrey Schnapp, founder and faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard, introduced by Luc Courchesne, in the “McLuhan Massage Parlour” at Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT).

Dr. Schnapp will present a talk entitled “Marshall McLuhan and the Electric Information Age Book” based on his recent book, The Electric Information Age Book (co-authored with Adam Michaels (Princeton Architectural Press, January, 2012). This book explores the nine-year window between 1966 and 1975, when a group of designers, graphic artists, and editors literally invented the future of the paperback book. The period begins in 1966 when Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore, in collaboration with Marshall McLuhan, employed a variety of radical techniques—verbal visual collages and other typographic pyrotechnics—to produce a book in the shape of “an inventory of effects:” The Medium Is the Massage. Schnapp’s keynote address will be presented in the context of Luc Courchesne’s immersive installation entitled “le salon de massage McLuhan” (in collaboration with Mike Wozniewski, Benjamin Bergery, Luc Martinez et David Duguay). This interactive experience, inspired by McLuhan’s, Fiore’s and Agel’s book, marks the one-hundredth anniversary of McLuhan’s birth in a medium that he could only have dreamed about. During Dr. Schnapp’s keynote, the public will be located at the center of the Satosphere dome, while Luc Courchesne will “move” inside The Medium is the Massage whose every page has been redeployed in the 3D space of the Satosphere dome, the biggest immersive projection room in the world. This gigantic dome, with its 54-foot diameter and 45-foot height, is equipped with eight video projectors and 157 speakers to allow immersive and participatory exhibits of this kind.

On April 25th, the medium will thus be the message, the mental and audiovisual massage of the cybernetic age!

PROGRAMME: 1:00 pm – Welcoming Address

1:15 pm – Session 1 – Decoupling Innis and McLuhan?

Chair –Sandra Gabriele, Professor
Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University

“Le concept de moyen de communication dans l’École de Toronto”
Luiz Martino, Professeur, Faculdade de Comunicação, Universidade de Brasilia

“Innis, un homme de son temps ? McLuhan, un homme de l’espace ?”
Gaetan Tremblay, Professeur, École des médias, UQAM

“The Rise of McLuhanism, The Loss of Innis-sense: Rethinking the Toronto School of Communication”
Bill Buxton, Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University

Respondent:
Shirley Roburn, PhD Candidate, Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University

3:00 pm – break

3:15 pm  -  Session 2 – Probing McLuhan

Chair – Lorna Roth, Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University

“Marshall McLuhan and the Economies of Citation”
Darren Wershler, Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature, Department of English, Concordia University

“Le concept de forme chez McLuhan. Plaidoyer pour un changement d’ethos”
Oumar Kane, Professeur, Département de communication sociale et publique (UQAM)

“McLuhan’s legacies: An Animal-studies perspective”
David Jaclin, PhD Candidate, Département de communication, Université de Montréal

Respondent: Christina Haralanova
PhD Candidate, Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University

5:00 pm – break

5:30 – Keynote

“Marshall McLuhan and the Electric Information Age Book”
Jeffrey Schnapp, Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures and Comparative Literature, Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University

“Le salon de massage McLuhan”
Luc Courchesne, Professeur, École de design industriel, Université de Montréal

7:00 – 8:00 Reception

Jeffrey T. Schnapp is Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures at Harvard University, where he also teaches on the faculty of the Department of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design, and serves as faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. In February 2011, he co-founded a new laboratory under the aegis of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society: metaLAB (at) Harvard. Though primarily anchored in the field of Italian studies  (before moving to Harvard in 2011, he occupied the Pierotti Chair of Italian Studies at Stanford) Dr. Schnapp has played a pioneering role in several areas of transdisciplinary research and has been at the forefront of a new wave of digital humanities work. His research interests extend from antiquity to the present, encompassing the material history of literature, the history of 20th-century architecture and design, and the cultural history of science and engineering. Trained as a Romance linguist, Schnapp is the author or editor of twenty books and over one hundred essays. His book Crowds was the recipient of the Modernist Studies Association prize for best book of 2006.  He has recently co-authored The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback.

Luc Courchesne Based in Montreal, Luc Courchesne is a founding member of the Society for Art and Technology [SAT], and since 1989, professor of design at Université de Montréal, where he teaches media and experiential design. Over the last thirty years he has made a major contribution to the emergence of media arts. His early work on interactive portraiture and landscape contributed to a revolution in these genres with his installations and “panoscopic” images, which transform spectators into visitors, actors and inhabitants of his experiential crafts. His work is part of major collections in North America, Europe and Asia and has been shown extensively in galleries and museums worldwide, including: Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo’s InterCommunication Center (ICC), Paris’ La Villette, Karlsruhe’s ZKM/Medienmuseum, Montreal’s Musée d’art contemporain, the National Gallery of Canada, Barcelona’s Fundacion La Caixa and Beijing’s National Art Museum of China.

The Joint Ph.D. Program in Communication is unique in North America. Created in 1987, this dynamic, inter-university program combines the talents of some 50 professors, a hundred and fifty students, and the staff of three institutions: the University of Montreal, Concordia University, and the University of Quebec at Montreal. One of the challenges and, indeed, strengths of the program is its bilingual nature.

       

Last year was the Centenary of Marshall McLuhan’s birth on July 21, 1911. This year it’s Northrop Frye’s turn; he was born on July 14, 1912 in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Great literary scholar that he was, Frye was also Marshall McLuhan’s rival in academic politics and scholarly influence at the University of Toronto during the ’60s and ’70s. The state of their attitudes towards each other is revealed in a comment made by literary scholar George Steiner about a visit he made to the University of Toronto:- “Many years ago, one evening in Massey College, I sat with Robertson Davies, Norrie Frye, Kathleen Coburn (the world’s greatest Coleridge scholar), when there walked in a very much younger Marshall McLuhan. Astounded, and without thinking, I turned to Professor Frye, and said, “There’s Marshall McLuhan.” I cannot hope to reproduce the air of sardonic melancholy which immediately invaded Norrie’s features. He had a long look, and said, “So the man alleges.” This is to say what Toronto was at that moment – and perhaps will be again? – the absolute centre for the study of Letters and the Humanities, possibly in the world.” http://tinyurl.com/7s98eea *** For his part, McLuhan and his co-conspirator and Explorations Seminar research associate, anthropologist Ted Carpenter conspired against Frye’s influence and his ideas on literary archetypes and massive systematization of literature in his then very influential Anatomy of Criticism (1957). McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand writes: “They would refer in public … to a mysterious entity they named Hugo. This turned out to be a reference to their common enemy Northrop Frye, who at that time commonly signed himself H. Northrop Frye (the H standing, in fact,  for Herman) (The Medium & the Messenger, 1989, p. 125). Academic politics aside, one cannot but feel that each had a grudging respect for the other; academic politics can be a near blood sport. *** The following article from UofT Magazine provides a retrospective of Northrop Frye’s scholarship and influence:-  SPRING 2012   -   Frye’s Anatomy   -   By Alec Scott

To his English students, Northrop Frye, the brilliant literary critic, was an intellectual god and a master lecturer. One-on-one, though, he could be difficult to read.

The advice gives a sense of how deeply Frye valued what the academy had to offer: discipline for the mind and fodder for the creative soul.

Certainly, he himself always flourished in academe – both as a student at U of T and at Oxford University during the Depression, and then as a professor. While teaching at U of T’s Victoria College from 1939 to near his death in 1991, he published many books and scholarly articles about the literary greats, modern and antique, parsing the likes of Shakespeare, James Joyce, Emily Dickinson, Baldassare Castiglione, T.S. Eliot and William Blake. He didn’t limit himself to a particular period, national literature or genre – he grandly took the whole of literature as his subject.

As if wrestling with the giants wasn’t enough, he also sought to reform the whole project of literary criticism, wanting to turn it into a quasi-scientific discipline. For this, he was called – sometimes reverently, sometimes not – the Einstein of criticism. His 1957 work, Anatomy of Criticism, sought to show how every story ever told could be fit into four essential moulds. Further, the book analyzed literature in light of psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s work with archetypes, arguing that certain common symbols and figures populate all of literature, from folktales and ancient myths to contemporary novels.

It sounds, perhaps, to the general-interest reader like difficult stuff – and it is – but Frye’s writing is at least not opaque. He made a religion of clarity and turned out lucid, stylish sentence after lucid, stylish sentence. The complexity was always in the thought, not the prose. “In a way that some academics are not, Frye was a writer,” says University Professor Emeritus Edward Chamberlin, a former grad student of Frye’s. Valente agrees: “I had to try to live up to his beautiful sentences when I was translating them.”

Perhaps partly on the strength of its eminently readable style, Anatomy sold well immediately, and for two decades became an inescapable text for English students, assigned by professors at universities around the world. Frye’s influence reached its height in 1978, when only Plato, Marx, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Lenin, Freud and Roland Barthes were more frequently cited by fellow academics. They even used an adjective – “Frygian” – to describe arguments inspired by him or young scholars following his lead.

During the postmodernist wave that began to wash over North America in the 1980s, though, Anatomy fell out of style, and many hip, young literature profs took it off their reading lists. But, by then, the never-still Frye had moved on to the project that would absorb his last decade: showing how the Bible was the bedrock on which all Western literature sits.

While his international reputation rose and fell, his standing on campus remained relatively constant. For most of the last four decades (of the five) he taught at U of T, he was considered an intellectual beacon for the university – one of the profs (with his contemporary Marshall McLuhan) who’d put U of T on the global radar.  Read the est at http://tinyurl.com/75v67t5 .
Watch an interview with Northrop Frye in 1973:-
 
 

Lloyd Dennis signing one of his books for a fan

“The underlying aim of education is to further man’s unending search for truth …”. Those are the opening words of the 1968 Ontario Ministry of Education’s Hall-Dennis Report, arguably the most important government report on education published in Canada. Its principal author, school teacher, consultant and principal, Lloyd Dennis, died on March 7. The following extract is from the Globe & Mail’s Obituary:-

Lloyd Dennis ushered in a new approach to education – andersoncharters

From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail – Published Tuesday, Mar. 27, 2012 

Lloyd Dennis, who died on March 7 at his home in Orillia, Ont., at the age of 88, was one of his generation’s most influential educators, revered by many and misunderstood by some.

Raised in the hardscrabble backwoods of Depression-era Muskoka, Dennis was a Second World War paratrooper and a postwar Toronto grade school teacher and principal, who became prominent with the 1968 release of Living and Learning: The Report of the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario, better known as the Hall-Dennis Report.

The progressive report advocated scrapping rote learning and regimentation for a child-centred, inquiry-based model that would tailor lessons to students’ individual needs and interests. Personal discovery was in; corporal punishment was out. …  “Living and Learning became the most internationally recognized and respected report ever produced in Ontario and perhaps the most-quoted document ever published in the province. But, to its critics, it also became the perceived cause of everything that was, and was seen to be, wrong with the schools of Ontario – even though its recommendations were never legislated in any consistent way throughout the jurisdiction.” -  http://tinyurl.com/c9oyxsg

 1950s classroom 

Marshall McLuhan influenced that report with his ideas on progressive education, presented to the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education, co-chaired by Justice E.M. Hall and Lloyd Dennis. Marshall McLuhan presented his ideas on education to that committee late in 1966 and is acknowledged for his input, along with his colleague Father John Culkin, SJ, of Fordham University within the report itself. Lloyd Dennis recalls Marshall McLuhan’s presentation to the committee in his memoir “The Learning Circus” (1997): 

The atmosphere is electric as we wait for Marshall McLuhan, the recognized guru of human communication.

Proud of this internationally recognized thinker, a Canadian Oracle that some say is in a class with Newton, Darwin, Einstein and Pavlov, we wonder what gems he will offer us.

By now we had been deluged with lessons learned around the world and at home and saturated by countless briefs from impassioned groups and individuals, by research papers and expert presentations and with our own library of more than one hundred selected volumes. Now, what will McLuhan have to offer?

“Your education system is dead meat,” he begins. Than he argues, convincingly, that the whole approach to organized learning belongs to another century. Children of today are in a new electronic age. They think differently, learn differently and respond differently because they are tactile people, aural people, like tribal man before the age of print. They learn by pattern recognition, but they go to school and are confronted by print-minded teachers. Everything is broken down in packages called subjects – “it’s like trying to study a flood by counting the trees going by, it doesn’t make sense to them. If you think you have a drop-out rate now, you should think of it in twenty years! This rate is nothing unless you are prepared to do something about it. Want to kill interest in Shakespeare? Put him in a book, then put the book on a course of study.”

We are deeply impressed with our local hero, and although we are not sure how we can respond in our deliberations, his effect upon us is profound, and will ultimately be reflected in the [Hall-Dennis] Report”.   - From Dennis, Lloyd (1997). The Learning Circus: A Memoir. Toronto, Umbrella Press, p. 168.