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.
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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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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 
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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
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A Man for All Media
From Marshall & Me – Michael Hinton’s Blog- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
Thoughts on Marshal McLuhan
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
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