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PROBING MCLUHAN: UNDERSTANDING MEDIA CULTURE
Opening Music:
The Ballad of Marshall McLuhan
The Radio Free Vestibules |
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Welcome
and Opening Remarks
Jody Berland,
Associate Professor, Division
of Humanities, York University and Editor: TOPIA: Canadian
Journal of Cultural Studies
Innis and McLuhan:
Environmentalists
Robert Babe,
Professor and Jean Monty/BCE Chair
in Media Studies, Faculty of Information & Media Studies,
The University of Western Ontario.
McLuhan and Speed
in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Bob Hanke,
Sessional Assistant Professor, Communication
Studies Program and Joint Graduate Programme in Communication
& Culture, York University.
Is TV Still Sticky
in the Age of a Digital McLuhan?
Gary Genosko,
Associate Professor and Canada Research
Chair, Department of Sociology, Lakehead University.
McLuhan and the
Death of Art
Janine Marchessault,
Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair, Department
of Film & Video, York University.
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Welcome and Opening
Remarks
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Innis and McLuhan: Environmentalists
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Innis and McLuhan are seldom cited in the environmentalists’
literature. Nonetheless, both can be understood as contributing
substantially to what I call a “Culture of Ecology,”
that is modes of analysis, symbolizing, and in the end acting
that are broadly consistent with ecological principles.
I’ve noted elsewhere that Innis’s media/communication
thesis foreshadowed important aspects of the ecological
thought and media criticism of David Suzuki. Moreover, both
his staples and media theses propose bi-directional interactions
among the material environment, human thought and messaging,
and human activity in the context of political/economic
power and control--a holism positing radical interdependencies
that is quite consistent with ecological thought, but at
odds with incremental, partial analyses characterizing much
of western mainstream thinking.
In terms of ecological modes of thought, McLuhan went even
further than Innis, however, actually terming his mode of
analysis an “ecological approach.” Electric
media, he claimed, merge individuals and environment into
an interdependent, simultaneous system. Moreover, McLuhan
depicted human artifacts as extensions of the body and/or
mind; for him, as for ecologists today, human nature evolves
due to “extra-genetic” (cultural/technological)
changes-- a position quite distinct from mainstream political
and economic thought.
To attain a Culture of Ecology, a radical transformation
in modes of thought is required. Innis and McLuhan are both
beacons in this regard.
About Robert Babe
Robert E. Babe is the first holder of the
Jean Monty/BCE Chair in Media Studies at the University
of Western Ontario. Authored books include: Canadian
Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers; Telecommunications
in Canada; and Communication and the Transformation
of Economics. Just finished is a book manuscript entitled,
Cultural Ecology.
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McLuhan and Speed in the Age
of Digital Reproduction
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Marshall McLuhan offered a critique of media that probed,
among other social and psychic consequences, the shift from
the experience of time to the experience of speed. Simultaneity,
instantaneity and the uncertainty and unpredictability of
living in the global present were among his concerns from
early on; accelerating speed became a significant theme
in his later, lesser known, writings.
Instead of the evolution towards a global village of simultaneous
social action and unified consciousness that McLuhan spoke
of in the 1960s, during the 1970s he began to see new technologies
of ultrarapid communication as giving impetus to greater
acceleration with paradoxical effects and detrimental consequences.
In his last posthumously published book The Global Village,
he announced that we are no longer living in a community
of speed, but at the “beginning of a speed of light
society.” As technology penetrates the human and social
body more deeply, McLuhan warned that we were not designed
to live at the speed of light. The later McLuhan began to
rethink his earlier technotopian views of computing in order
to observe the satisfactions and dissatisfactions, positive
and negative results, of living in a “speed of light
society.”
About Bob Hanke
Bob Hanke’s work on McLuhan will appear in G. Genosko
(Ed.), Marshall McLuhan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural
Theory (Routledge, 2005) and P. Grosswiler (Ed.) Transforming
McLuhan: Critical, Cultural and Postmodern Perspectives
(Hampton Press, forthcoming). His has recently written on
the political economy of Indymedia practice (Canadian
Journal of Communication, forthcoming) and co-edited
TOPIA 11, a special thematic issue on Culture and Technology.
He is a co-founding member of CAMERA--Committee
on Alternative Media Experimentation, Research & Analysis.
CAMERA’s first pilot video project is tentatively
titled “Understanding Media Poll-itics.”
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Is TV Still Sticky in the
Age of a Digital McLuhan?
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At the end of the cathode ray tubes dominance of televisual
hardware, new flat screens are emerging in domestic, commercial
and public spaces the so-called plasma and liquid crystal
display (LCD) and organic light-emitting diode technologies
(OLED). These sets are commercially valorized through new
media rhetorics. Nothing of the tactile experience of the
tube upon which McLuhan reflected seems to have been lost
in the dying days of the reign CRT. But surely, after the
ray gun, the “scanning finger” is lost to the
projector. Is, then, digital TV tactile? Is TV still cool?
Is McLuhan forever out of focus in the age of smart, high-definition
TV?
About Gary Genosko
Gary Genosko is Canada Research Chair in Technoculture at
Lakehead University in Thunder Bay. Recently, he edited
the three volume collection Marshall McLuhan: Critical
Evaluations in Cultural Theory, forthcoming from Routledge.
He is editor of The Semiotic Review of Books, and
coeditor of the special issue on Technology and Culture
of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.
His ebook, McLuhan and Baudrillard: The Masters of Implosion,
is available from Taylor&Francis.
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McLuhan and the Death of
Art
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The great literary critic George Steiner once noted that McLuhan introduced
us to a new form of cultural practice which he characterized as art that dies,
that takes place in the temporal fabric of everyday life and disappears. This
talk will be concerned with the kinds of ephemerality that interested McLuhan:
advertisements, the live performance, the writings of James Joyce, and the
media. It will consider the meanings of the ephemeral and the sacred in light
of the commercial media that plagued McLuhans thinking and in the context
of more recent global art interventions’ and synchronized political
actions in the anti-globalization and peace movements.
About Janine Marchessault
Janine Marchessault is a Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization
at York University where she is Associate Professor in the Department of Film
and Video. She has recently completed a book on Marshall McLuhan, Cosmic
Media (2004 Sage Publications). She is a founding editor of the journal
Public and has co-edited numerous anthologies including Wild
Science: Reading Medicine, Feminism and the Media (1999) (with Kim Sawchuk),
Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema (2000)(with
Kay Artmatage, Kass Banning and Brenda Longfellow) and Fluid Screens:
Digital Aesthetics and Intermedia (with Susan Lord) (forthcoming).
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