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Filed under: Academic, Announcement, Articles, Education, Ideas, Journals, Media Ecology, New Media, Scholars, Technology, Uncategorized | Closed
An invitation from Paolo Granata to everyone interested in media in this digital era…
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Rogers Communication Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University
Filed under: Announcement, Education, Ideas, information, Invitation, journalism, Lectures, McLuhan Salons, News | Closed
In his new course, U of Toronto prof Paolo Granata tackles the allegorical nature of Netflix mega-hit ‘Squid Game’ (photos courtesy Granata)
By
Hundreds of millions of people all over the world watched Netflix’s Squid Game, but only one turned the hit series into a university course. Paolo Granata is the head of the media studies program at the University of Toronto, where part of the mission is to study contemporary media in real time. In his class “Squid Game and the Media,” Granata’s students examine the broader implications of the show’s global success—and occasionally dress up like the main characters.
Q – Before we get into your class, Squid Game was the most popular series in the history of Netflix. What was it about the show that made it such a hit?
A – I think you can look at the rise of the Hallyu or, in English, the “K-Wave”, which had been in the air for several years before Squid Game came out. It started with Korean dramas, and then the rise of K-Pop in general and BTS in particular—the whole world developed an interest in the Korean aesthetic and sensibility, which are very much rooted in contrasts and dichotomy: bright, extreme colours to emphasize darkness, comedy to highlight tragedy, childlike visuals and sounds during the most brutal scenes, which we see a lot in Squid Game and, before that, in Parasite. When that movie had the success it did, that was a significant benchmark.
Netflix has gotten ahead of Hollywood by developing culturally authentic programming for a global audience, which is essentially the opposite of what they started out doing—bringing Hollywood content to foreign countries. Squid Game is a perfect example of a very region-specific piece of entertainment with mass appeal.
Q – Squid Game is also a story about wealth disparity, which became a very hot topic during the pandemic. Did that also play into the way the show resonated?
A – Absolutely. I’m sure you remember that people talked about the pandemic as being the “great equalizer,” but unfortunately that was not the case. Instead, we saw a lot of pre-existing inequality that was exposed. Similarly, in Squid Game we see this illusion of equality. All the players are “equal”—they all have the same chance to win the prize money. And they seem to have options.
In the first episode, every player is given the chance to leave the world of the game and go back to their regular lives. Many do, having realized that they are likely to die pursuing the prize money. But most of them come back because they realize that their financial circumstances leave them without options, which is where we see the illusion of free will, and the illusion that equality means equity, when in fact these are two very different concepts. Ultimately, the conditions created by a capitalist society do not make people free.
Q – I really liked Squid Game and I talked about it with my friends. You must have really liked Squid Game to create a university-level seminar course based on the show.
A – I definitely enjoyed it enough to watch the entire series in just a couple of days. And then I went back and watched it again in the original Korean with English subtitles, which is a far better experience in terms of appreciating the performance. But it was only when I saw the numbers—hundreds of millions of viewers, the number-one show in 94 countries—that I started thinking about it from a media studies perspective. This was fall 2021, when we were starting to talk about the 2022-23 curriculum. Our motto in the media studies department is “media in real time.” In 2019 we started offering courses that capture a big trending topic. We did “Trump and the Media,” then “#MeToo and the Media,” then “#BlackLivesMatter and the Media,” and “Indigenous Cultures and the Media.” I thought Squid Game would be great because of how relevant the story was and, of course, because so many people had seen it.
Q – Did the course fill up immediately?
A – We decided on an application process because I wanted to avoid students enrolling just because they loved the show. This is a fourth-year seminar class with a group research component. Every applicant had to explain their interest in the class and also what resources they would use to approach the show from an academic perspective. We received a total of 52 applications, including students from my media studies program but also from philosophy, anthropology and creative writing. We ended up with a diverse group, which is exactly what I was hoping for. We have three Korean students who have been able to explain some of the show’s linguistic nuances, students from China who can talk about how the show was received in their country, and students from the creative expression and society program, who can share perspectives on narratology and storytelling that help us to analyze the plot.
Q – On your syllabus, the classes have the same names as Squid Game’s episodes. How else did you pay homage to the series?
A – I had an actor come in for the first class—a former student who was a fan of the show—to deliver the Front Man’s famous monologue on equity… in costume. I thought that was a good way to establish the right mood. I think the class really enjoyed it and they also got into the spirit. One student showed up in the green player’s uniform; another brought the board game, which we will definitely play at some point. And then on the last day of class we’re going to make the Dalgona honeycomb cookies from episode two.
I really believe that playfulness can inspire creativity, which leads to better research. My role is about more than just content. Information is everywhere these days—you can go online or watch a documentary. The professor of the 21st century is an experience designer.
Q – Week 2 is called Red Light, Green Light. On the show, that was the game where a giant doll murdered anyone who moved when they weren’t supposed to. How have you adjusted this to avoid the needless slaughter of students?
A – Ha! For us, it is about looking at “Red Light, Green Light” and how it is played in so many different cultures around the world. In our group there are students from China, from Korea, from Europe, Canada, so we shared how the game differs from one culture to another and what that says about the diversity of cultures, but also commonalities.
Q – In Canada I think it’s called “What Time Is It Mr. Wolf?”
That’s right. And in Italy, where I’m from, it’s “Un, Due, Tres, Estrella.” The game is an archetype and a metaphor for life, which is true of all the games in Squid Game. In the playground we learn about competition and co-operation. We learn to read symbolic aspects of life, and concepts of justice, equality and inequality. The very nature of play is a symbolic activity; by playing we learn how to live and how to cope. In the show the main character, Seong Gi-hun, comes in as a very childlike character and by the end has transformed into an adult by facing the cruelty of life. It is the idea of metamorphosis that is present in so many classic allegories and fairy tales. I’m a big fan of Pinocchio.
Q – Speaking of archetypes, the VIPs in Squid Game—the evil billionaires who watch the players kill each other for sport—are all white Westerners. The creator of the show has even compared them to Trump. How does your class approach that aspect of the show?
A – Definitely the VIPs represent the highest peak of capitalism. The fact that they all wear gold masks evokes the old Greek tragedies. And then when you look at how they arrive on the island where the game is taking place—they fly in on helicopters like gods coming down from the heavens, which is part of a whole religious motif. The piggy bank that contains all the prize money hangs from the ceiling in a way that evokes a modern cathedral, only the religion is capitalism. So I can understand the Trump comparison. One of my students is talking about analyzing the games in the show as an allegory of imperial capitalism. The Trump era certainly feels like an accurate manifestation of that.
Q – Season 2 is coming to Netflix later this year, or early next. With the key mystery solved and most of our favourite characters feeding worms, where do you think they’ll take it?
A – We have talked about this quite a bit in class. I asked my students if they would prefer a sequel or a prequel and most say the latter, so that we could have these characters from the first season return and we could learn more about their already rich backstories. I tend to agree.
Q – In the meantime, Netflix is releasing a reality show called Squid Game: The Challenge. Did you consider trying out?
To play? No. But I will definitely watch. I have heard about some contestants on the set talking about the “intolerable conditions.” Netflix is denying that, so who knows what the truth is.
Q – Any idea of what next year’s trending-topic course might be?
A – Definitely the hot topic right now, in academia and beyond, is this ChatGPT bot and similar advanced AI language models. I think that might make a good pick.
(From MacLean’s Magazine online, Feb. 7, 2023) at https://www.macleans.ca/culture/squid-game-netflix-university-course-professor/
Squid Game – Korean Promotional Poster
Filed under: Academic, Articles, Commentary, Education, Games, Ideas, Interviews, Pop Culture, St Michaels College, Students, TV, university | Closed
Marshall McLuhan at the Coach House on the University of Toronto campus, (Robert Lansdale, University of Toronto Archives).
By Alexander Kuskis, PhD
University of Toronto
The purpose of the Centre for Culture and Technology, as initially envisioned by Marshall McLuhan in 1963, was to “advance the understanding of the origins and effects of technology.” One of the specific objectives was “to organize an inter-disciplinary seminar for staff members and graduate students and to devise new experimental procedures for identifying the psychic and social consequences of technological change.” These were revolutionary ideas at the time and there was excitement in the air.
McLuhan, whose name became identified with the new field of Media Studies, believed that bringing together scholars, business people, artists, and other leaders in their fields, would provide analysis of, and solutions to, problems that evaded those isolated in their own professional silos. The journal “Explorations” (See https://wipfandstock.com/search-results/?series=explorations-in-communications), co-edited by McLuhan with Edmund Carpenter, was just such an exercise. See also some of the original editions of “Explorations” here: https://tinyurl.com/rb6mban
To ensure McLuhan’s return to the University of Toronto from Fordham University in New York where he was occupying the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities for the academic year 1967-68, McLuhan was promised a building and small staff in which to house his Centre. He was offered an unused coach house behind the Kelly Library on its west side, which acting director Arthur Porter took charge of until McLuhan returned. For the next 12 years, the Centre was a thriving hub of exploration, innovation, and scholarly production.
After Marshall McLuhan died in 1980, the Centre found continued life as the renamed McLuhan Program for Culture and Technology, whose main purpose was to be the sponsorship of lectures and research on the work of Marshall McLuhan and related activities. From 1983 until 2008, the McLuhan Program was under the direction of Derrick de Kerckhove who was McLuhan’s colleague, student, and translator. After de Kerckhove’s tenure, the Faculty of Information, also known as the iSchool, renamed the program the Coach House Institute (CHI), distancing the faculty from McLuhan’s legacy. In 2016, CHI was renamed once again in McLuhan’s honour as the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology. The Estate agreed to this with the tacit understanding that finally, a centre for McLuhan Studies would be established at the University. This was not to be. The programming since the renaming in 2016, has not been McLuhan-centred.
Realizing that the Faculty of Information had no intention of nurturing a centre for McLuhan Studies, the Estate and heirs decided to rescind permission for the use of the McLuhan name. The process, begun in May 2022, will be completed this month according to the current Dean, Wendy Duff.
The Estate and heirs would still be happy to see a program of McLuhan Studies established at the University of Toronto or another Toronto-based University. Michael McLuhan, Executor for the Estate, said it “would have to be an institution with the integrity and funding necessary to establish a program or Chair to further scholarship in the field of McLuhan Studies.” While there are several historical plaques at the University of Toronto, plus a street named Marshall McLuhan Way, and a sculpture on campus attesting to Marshall McLuhan’s association with the university, there is no longer his Coach House with his name on it that was associated with him for 55-years. That is a pity for his many former students, collaborators, and admirers from around the world who recognized his accomplishments in the new fields of media ecology, media literacy, and media studies.
Filed under: 1960s, Academic, Announcement, Articles, Commentary, Education, Michael McLuhan, Remembrance, university | Closed
Media ecology is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry rooted in both North American and Continental European academic traditions that remains largely under the radar of contemporary scholars. This book aims to concisely and systematically survey a wide range of 20th-century thinkers who shared an approach to media studies as a complex system of relations and processes, viewing technologies as habitats in which changes occur that shape human culture.
The use of the word ‘ecology,’ according to its original etymon, implies that media are not treated—as they usually are—as mere means or tools used by people to communicate or interact with the world. Media ecology rather encapsulates a holistic view that approaches media as a complex system of cultural, technological, and communication forms within which human beings live. Media ecology takes the plurality of media forms back to a unitary and coherent, although open and dynamic, human ecosystem. That means conceiving the media not just as conduits or instruments, but rather as actual environments and thus human ecosystems.
This book offers a comprehensive survey of the most influential thinkers of media ecology from both North America (such as Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Neil Postman, Susanne Langer, Lewis Mumford, and Gregory Bateson) and Europe (including Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Jacques Ellul, Regis Debray, and Jack Goody to name just a few), as well as of the main schools of thought associated with these thinkers in Toronto, New York, Chicago, Palo Alto and elsewhere. This book also provides a history of convergence of different disciplines involved in the formation of media ecology—history, literary criticism, economics, sociology, anthropology—as required by a truly interdisciplinary, humanistic approach. In doing so, this book introduces readers to key concepts and defines a historiographic map of the intellectual tradition now formally recognized as media ecology. This book is intended as an essential guide for readers—graduate and undergraduate students—who wish to approach this still unexplored field of study with an informed view of its history, aims, and approaches.
Paolo Granata is an educator, innovator, and a cross-disciplinary media scholar. Throughout his 20-year academic career in research, teaching, and public engagement, he has held positions at the University of Bologna, the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and Turin, and most recently at the University of Toronto. His advocacy efforts are focused on digital equity and digital sustainability, exploring the potential that information and communication technologies hold for enacting positive social change.
Paolo Granata in front of the McLuhan Centre for Culture & Technology
This book is available in Canada from: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B09LGQSGZL/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
And in the USA from: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Media-Ecology-Thinkers-concepts/dp/B09LGQSGZL/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2RGFWE23XHML4&keywords=Introduction+to+Media+Ecology&qid=1675187195&sprefix=introduction+to+media+ecology%2Caps%2C629&sr=8-1
Filed under: Academic, Books, Commentary, Education, Ideas, Influenced by McLuhan, Media Ecology, Print, Scholars, Technology, Theory, Toronto School | Closed
Marshall McLuhan in an undated photo (Wikimedia Commons)
Renée Darline Roden – December 15, 2022
Nick Ripatrazone’s new book on Marshall McLuhan, Digital Communion, arrived in my mailbox the day I presented a play about Marshall McLuhan at a conference on the Catholic imagination in Dallas, Tex. A fitting coincidence, if such things exist.
I began writing the play as part of the Church Communications Ecology program at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. The program brought together around 30 communications professionals to read, learn and create projects to help the church communicate its message in a digital age. “Communications professionals” was a broadly defined term. Our cohort consisted of college professors, high school teachers, writers, digital media entrepreneurs, seminarians and two artists (myself one of them).
We met via Zoom for two months at the beginning of 2022 to discuss a wide range of readings. We read theology from Bonaventure and Romano Guardini, as well as from ecological thinkers like Rachel Carson. We pondered Andy Warhol’s imagination and learned the communication theory behind Fred Rogers’s television neighborhood. We watched Bo Burnham’s “Inside,” discussed the phenomenon of Wordle on our class message boards and consumed media theorists Walter Ong, S.J., and Marshall McLuhan.
Nick Ripatrazone, author of Digital Communion, visited one of these Zoom classes. In our class, he spoke about his new book and shared its thesis: “McLuhan’s Catholicism is not a footnote but rather a foundation of his media theories.” For a thinker like McLuhan, who is not as widely celebrated as other 20th-century American Catholic thinkers, this simple thesis is a surprisingly radical new paradigm.
Born in Alberta, Canada, in 1911, McLuhan converted to Catholicism in 1937 while at Cambridge writing his dissertation. He became a professor at St. Michael’s College in Toronto, and his first books, The Mechanical Bride (1951) and The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)skyrocketed him to public intellectual fame in the television age.
Ripatrazone’s Digital Communion opens with a pericope describing the first televised papal Mass in the United States—in Yankee Stadium on Oct. 4, 1965—a story that introduces the dramatic tensions between technology and faith. And perhaps a story that shows the Catholic Church is unprepared, as it was with the advent of the printing press, for the seismic shifts a new medium like television will cause.
After this opening anecdote, the book cuts to McLuhan’s appointment to the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. McLuhan, Ripatrazone argues in multiple chapters, was perhaps ahead of his time. In the 1960s, McLuhan already saw the internet on the horizon when the rest of the world was falling in love with broadcast television. Now that we are streaming television shows in the palm of our hand around the clock, we are ready for McLuhan’s prophecies of the digital age.
Ripatrazone’s style in this spiritual biography and light theological exegesis of McLuhan’s thought echoes McLuhan’s own mosaic style. The author fills the pages with McLuhan’s own words, which is easy to do since McLuhan is an infectious coiner of aphorisms. McLuhan’s idiosyncratic formulations are always striking and original, making it difficult to resist quoting him verbatim.
Ripatrazone dives into McLuhan’s singularly personal life, phraseology and his core beliefs, excavating the Catholic thread running through each. He tells the story of McLuhan’s conversion at Cambridge. McLuhan’s love of Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce led him to Catholicism and inspired his media theory. Ripatrazone also delves into McLuhan’s skepticism of Gutenberg and his printing press, the shrinking and uniting effects of print and digital media and the concept of the global village.
Print itself is a more mechanical intervention than perhaps we digital natives realize. We are so used to virtual environments that communication outside of screens seems more natural and organic. But, McLuhan notes, Gutenberg’s printing press was the first media invention to make the world small.
Gutenberg’s print alphabet, McLuhan believed, contributed to the Reformation. The repeated type, printed over and over again, with no individuality, more quickly produced than a manuscript, creates an industrialization of knowledge and an individualized access to it. It divides the world into small, accessible corners. McLuhan sees print as an individualizing and fragmentary medium. And the digital world, for McLuhan, brings us back into communion.
Which brings us to the concept of the global village, the situation we find ourselves in today. We find communion made difficult, ironically, by the hyper-connectivity of the internet. We are too wildly plugged into “a little bit of everything all of the time,” as Bo Burnham describes the internet. Patricia Lockwood dubs the World Wide Web: “The portal you enter only when you needed to be everywhere.” And if you are everywhere, you are, of course, nowhere.
We cannot escape our environment—we live in a particular climate zone, in a particular state, in a particular city, in a particular neighborhood. And digital media is part of that environment—the global village crashing into our city street.
But we can choose to engage with questions of how we will engage with our environment: What kind of global villager will we be? What sort of neighbor? How will we care for the world around us? How can we interact with the devices that are our media in our own terms, not in the terms they set, which, as McLuhan says, turn us into “servo-mechanisms.”
Many artists and other malcontents (like myself) who pick up on the poison in our environment see the content or individual technologies as the villains. McLuhan has reminded me, as Ripatrazone does, that the effort of digital communion and liturgy in the digital age is not so much a fault of an iPhone or a Zoom screen or a camera observing Mass, but it is environmental. The digital world creates an environment that forms us into habits of being: inattention, distraction, scrolling. But we can resist those environmental habits and reactions.
In fact, perhaps it is the task of the artist, McLuhan suggests, to draw attention to our environment, to the ground of our being-together, and the habits it forms. “The present is always invisible because it’s environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly,” wrote McLuhan, “thus everyone but the artist, the man of integral awareness, is alive in an earlier day.” The artist, McLuhan suggests, is the member of society who clearly sees the present, not the past.
The play I presented in Dallas, “Is the Internet in Color?” tells the story of a woman with Alzheimer’s disease who befriends a young journalist. A woman who holds the past in her body finds the present slipping away from her grasp. Her memory loss means the only reality for her will soon be the memories stored in her head. Borne back ceaselessly into the past has a violently literal meaning.
With theological and poetic interjections by Michael Murphy of the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola Chicago University and McLuhan-esque riffs by Brett Robinson, of the McGrath Institute for Church Life, we created a dialogue of sorts between the characters of the play and the ideas contained within the story of Nancy’s struggle with Alzheimer’s.
The woman, Nancy, meets a young man—a paradigmatic zoomer—whose journalistic job it is to record the memories of a collective body, a public. His industry is dying, as the internet is slowly killing local journalism as we once knew it. Does the internet force us to live in the past, like Nancy? Is it the preserved instantaneous, insignificant moments like having oatmeal for lunch, a latte featuring a heart made of foam, or drinks with the girls in Cabo that live forever on a timeline? Are we stuck in the past or in the present? “The present / is too much for the senses,” writes the poet Robert Frost, “too present to imagine.” Such a sentiment could also be said of the World Wide Web.
The gift of the artist, McLuhan said, is to draw a new awareness or attention to something in an environment. “The artist’s role is not to stress himself or his own point of view, but to let things sing and talk, to release the forms within them,” said McLuhan in a 1959 talk to seminarians.
The artist—at least the playwright—creates art that demands the participation of the audience. Unlike a television segment, a play is something created with the audience viewing it: their temperament, their reactions, their questions. It is a true liturgical act of participation, something the television age never quite captured.
Despite the connectivity of the digital age, we find ourselves increasingly alone. A play is one of those rare liturgies that helps us make meaning together. A play, like a print book about McLuhan, like the prophetic, pencil-wielding professor himself, is perhaps an artifact and medium of culture that can and will persist. Because it contains in itself something essential to our human nature.
Nature finds a way of sneaking into our perfectly curated environments. We find friction even when the digital environment is designed to be frictionless. We grow impatient when the internet is frozen, when Facebook’s servers go down, when Instagram can’t load and when our iPhone screen gets cracked. We find our global village is not an isolated community but part of a creation, part of a cosmos.
Although McLuhan agreed with his Jesuit influences that God is in all things, including the electronic light of the internet, he also understood that a society who had fundamentally remade its media had shaken its metaphors for our mediated God. Letters are no longer ink but pixelation, books are no longer calfskin but PDFs. If Christ is the logos, the Word, how do we imagine Christ now that words themselves have changed their form?
So here is the question McLuhan sets for Catholics in the 21st century: How do we enflesh God in a new age, in a new environment, when our understanding of language, communication and reality has been transformed? And, although the technological changes of the past century feel new, that question is as old as the apostles.
Perhaps we can follow the wisdom of McLuhan, who, rather than moralizing about changes, thought it profound enough to observe them. And observation begins with our attention. Our attention: Where do we put that each day? And what will we see when we attend not just to the digital world but to the whole world around us: lovely, radiating, resistant to our scrolling fingers? Perhaps we can then begin to see more clearly who we are when we are consumed in the glowing digital globe we hold in our hands.
This article also appeared in print, under the headline “A Prophet of the Media Age,” in the January 2023, issue. The source for this article is at tinyurl.com/4jmx3h4h
Filed under: Articles, Books about McLuhan, Commentary, Ideas, Internet, Media Ecology, New Media, Religion, Reviews | Closed
Best known as the amicable Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto when this film was made, Derrick de Kerckhove is at the core of a world think-tank dedicated to probing the rapid changes of our global village. The documentary Zulu Time follows this “wired man” in his globe-trotting career as media prophet and probes into some of the most fascinating questions confronting us in our new electronic galaxy. As the spiritual inheritor of McLuhan’s thought, de Kerckhove lives in perpetual oscillation between himself and his double, Marshall McLuhan, with whom he has become publicly identified and virtually assimilated.
Directed by Jonny Silver – 1999 | 52 min | for the National Film Board of Canada
Derrick de Kerckhove is the former director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD. in French Language and Literature from the University of Toronto and a Doctorat du 3e cycle in Sociology of Art from the University of Tours. From 1972 to 1980 he was an associate of the Centre for Culture and Technology and worked with Marshall McLuhan for over ten years as translator, assistant, and co-author.
He has worked on two collections of essays on McLuhan, culture, technology and biology, namely Understanding 1984 (UNESCO, 1984) and McLuhan e la metamorfosi dell’uomo (Bulzoni, 1984). Other publications include The Alphabet and the Brain (Springer Verlag, 1988), La civilisation vidéo-chrétienne (Feltrinelli, 1991), both books on the impact of the alphabet on mind and society, research taken further in Brainframes: Technology, Mind and Business (Bosch & Keuning, 1991). The Skin of Culture (Somerville Press, 1995) is a collection of essays on the new electronic reality. Connected Intelligence (Somerville, 1997) introduced his research on new media and cognition. The Architecture of Intelligence was conceived and supported by and for networks. His most recent book, McLuhan for Managers, in collaboration with Mark Federman, was published in September 2003. He was Professor in the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Naples Federico IIwhen this film was made. (Source: http://tinyurl.com/2s4y86s3
Derrick de Kerckhove
Filed under: Academic, Books, Commentary, Education, Films, Ideas, Influenced by McLuhan, Media Ecology, New Media, Scholars, Technology, university, Video | Closed
Andrew McLuhan in Prince Edward County at the Bloomfield Branch Library beside the McLuhan collection.
By Sharon Harrison
County resident Andrew McLuhan spoke to a small audience at the Bloomfield branch library about growing up as the grandson of Marshall McLuhan, where he outlined the path he is navigating to continue his renowned grandfather’s important legacy, through his own unique initiative.
To ensure Marshall’s work continues on in new and innovative ways, Andrew came up with the idea to create the McLuhan Institute (known as TMI). He spoke to progress made so far, current projects, and outlined the vision he has for TMI.
“I am building the McLuhan Institute to continue the work he and my father Eric McLuhan began in understanding the nature of media.”
Andrew has grand plans for TMI, saying he wants to continue the McLuhan studies and McLuhan tradition.
“It will be a world-class research institute, archive, museum, centre for learning and exploration, refuge and incubator for all kinds of arts”, but he acknowledges his ideas are “a little bit grandiose”.
“I am the kind of person who believes in shooting for the stars and if you end up on the moon, that’s still pretty impressive,” he says. “You can always bargain down, but it’s hard to bargain up. Always set your sights higher than even you think are possible, and you’ll get somewhere good and you may even get further.”
Marshall is considered by many as one of the pioneers of a particular type of media studies, the study of effect of innovation and technology on humans and culture.
“What he did that was different, and I always remind people that he was actually an English teacher for his entire career,” explained Andrew, “he started in English literature and he became quite well-known as a literary critic and educator before he got well-known for his side hustle, which was media studies.”
“Basically, what he did that was different was he took what he had learned for approaching literature and turned those tools of literary criticism onto technology and culture which was a new thing, and is basically the thing he did.“
While TMI isn’t open to the public yet, Andrew explains how his young family sold their Picton home two years ago and bought his parents property located near Bloomfield where he hopes to eventually develop it to be a destination where people can come.
The property includes a two-storey barn attached to a three-story barn, where Andrew notes the two-storey former pig or sheep barn was converted by his dad to his office and archive.
The hope is talks can take place there, exhibitions too, weekend workshops and retreats, as well as a space for the artistic exploration for shows and other events that relate to exploring and understanding culture and technology.
“My focus in not on building monuments, not on theories, but on tools we can use today to help us understand where we are heading, and more importantly, advocating for more intentional development of technology, so that we are not always playing catch up and trying to fix our messes, but ideally getting ahead of them.”
To provide a little context, Marshall McLuhan is described as a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar, and a professor of English literature. Andrew describes him as a thinker, a media pioneer, but also a person.
Marshall died on New Year’s Eve in 1980 aged 69 when Andrew was only two-and-a-half years old. Two years earlier, Marshall had a stroke which rendered him unable to communicate.
“He couldn’t read, he couldn’t write, he could whistle or sing sometimes; occasionally he could say something that made any sense, but really all he could do was babble,” explains Andrew.
“Apparently, occasionally, he would say “oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy” or things like that and the funny thing is, I was just starting to speak and apparently we would have these nonsense conversations, which I have no memory of obviously, but I like to think it sounded like nonsense to anybody else, but to us, it was obviously important things we were discussing.”
Andrew said his grandfather was expected to recover from the stroke and they were trying to teach him to speak again, but he died suddenly.
So Andrew had to get to know Marshall just like anybody else, through his work and through the things that he left behind, but he also recognizes, because of the time we live in, his grandfather remains very present over different types of media, in print media, visual and audio.
“It’s a privilege to be able to get to know somebody after they have died because they are so present. He may be gone, but he is such a continuous presence and it is not just family photos or maybe a recorded wedding speech or something, there are hundreds of hours of content out there just in audio and video, never mind other articles, interviews, etc. so that’s an odd thing.”
Andrew’s dad, Eric McLuhan, had been working with his father since the mid-60s as his personal assistant, where he continued after Marshall’s death, and had Andrew join him in 2009/2010.
“When Marshall died, no one was expecting it and there wasn’t any plan really to keep going. My dad was working with Marshall very informally and he was left without a plan of any sort.”
He explains his dad, in his mid-70s in 2016-2017, was not in the greatest health. He died suddenly in spring 2018 when they were in Colombia together.
“I didn’t want to be caught without a plan, so I came up with this idea for TMI,” explains Andrew, noting nobody else was going to take on the challenge. While he has sisters living in the United States, Andrew says they weren’t interested in continuing the work.
“I felt that this was something that needed to be maintained and preserved, that is constituted an intellectual tradition,” he says. “I was there and I found myself getting more and more interested; I figured that if I didn’t do anything, nobody elee would, and it was worth doing.”
Andrew admits when he was younger, his grandfather’s work was of little interest to him.
“It didn’t make any sense at all and I tried to read it as a teenager and it just went over my head, and I tried again in my 20s and didn’t get much further,” he said. “But I found in my 30s, my dad needed someone to travel with him to do the talks and I found these things made a little bit of sense for the first time.
“A little understanding goes a long way and it can be seductive, if not an addictive thing, it makes you want to learn more and understand more,” said Andrew. “I guess I had grown up, your brain matures, your thoughts mature and I was just at a point where I was ready for this kind of thing and I started getting more and more involved.”
The McLuhan Library & Archive
“My dream is definitely to open it up to the public, to be able to display it in an open-type setting.”
He talks about how Prince Edward County has been a destination for a century or more. “It hasn’t been a backwater for a long time,” he adds as he talks about the County’s recent growth and how the wine industry has been an attraction for visitors, the food industry too, and recreationally it is a big draw, so he is hoping TMI can provide more educational or intellectual reasons to visit here.
“To come for a weekend, fill your head with some ideas, go sample some wine, hit the beach, things like these could go together really well. This is my idea basically, to set up this research facility.”
Andrew speaks to the work as being “really heavy lifting on the brain” where he embraces the rural location that allows him to easily step away to take a walk up the lane through some fields with the dog when he needs a break or allow his thoughts to breathe.
The idea for TMI came to Andrew in summer 2017, just less than a year before his dad died where he was anticipating the day his dad wouldn’t be around.
“That happened way sooner than I was expecting, but at least I had already started to think about it.”
Andrew describes himself as a poet, a punk rocker and someone who ran an upholstery company for a decade.
Surprisingly, he says he is not an academic.
“I barely graduated high school. I used to think that not going to university was a liability, but now I realize it’s more of an asset because it means that I don’t speak like somebody who has been to university. I don’t try and put that on, I relate to things more politely and humanistically person-to-person.
“I honestly think that if I can understand this stuff, then anybody can, not that it’s simple, but if you do a little bit of work, you can figure it out.”
“Another thing that gives me hope is that I teach classes for Grade 5 and 6 students and I teach classes for university students and corporations, and to me it’s a testament to accessibility if I can explain or help,” said Andrew. “I don’t think in terms of explaining, I think more of helping people understand or to learn on their own these concepts. If kids can get it, the rest of us can, and that’s a really powerful thing.”
Andrew says he works with his hands and is interested in practical things, not so much in theory.
“I think we are at a time in our society where we need more than theory; we need practical things.”
He says his interest with TMI is not so much to create a monument or historical things (although he has historical things to preserve).
“My focus, I decided, would be what’s useful from what Marshall and my father did in order to help us going forward.”
“Marshall may have been a genius, but he wasn’t a wizard, he had methods, he developed ways of looking at technology in order to understand them,” explains Andrew. “So I decided the best thing that I could do would be to identify and extract these tools.”
He said a lot of the reason why Marshall’s work endured is because it’s not situated on television or the printed word, it is situated on media, on technology and innovation.
He said as long as the world continues to innovate and come up with new technologies, there needs to be new ways of looking at them.
“A lot of what Marshall did was not specific to any one technology, but he looked at technology as a field and developed methods for analyzing and understanding of it.”
He said the logical progression there is to move from studying what happened, to anticipating what might happen, and “have that inform what we actually might do because we are at a point in history where if we don’t start doing, that things don’t look so good.”
Marshall’s work focused on what he called the social and personal consequences of technologies, explains Andrew.
“How technologies, innovations, change, who we are personally, like individually, and then by extension, society, and that the lion’s share of changes come from changing society and that whole environment.”
Andrew has identified four key areas for TMI, namely research, education, archive and exploration, but he says a big part of what he wants to do is arts based.
He notes that his grandfather relied heavily on the arts in his career and to understand technology he quotes Ezra Pound who said, ‘the artist is the antenna of the race’ (ABC of Reading, 1934).
“What they meant is that artists are people in society who are constantly sharpening their perceptive faculties,” explains Andrew. “For the rest of us, children and artists are always the sharpest among us, the rest of us, our senses dull over time.
“Things don’t taste as sweet or as sharp as they used to. All of our senses start to dull in atrophy from underuse and just getting old, but artists are constantly out there trying to experience things in new ways and trying to relate them to us in new ways,” he says. “And because of this, they get a sense of technological change before the rest of us, and that is not to say they understand it any better than the rest of us, but they sense it better than the rest of us, and because of this they are very useful.”
Part of what he does is maintain the artifacts he has, such as the working library, and on-going research into developing tools for understanding.
“The way I bring those forward are through talks like this, I give workshops, I teach classes, I developed a class on Understanding Media (Marshall McLuhan, 1964).”
Andrew’s purpose with TMI is to create a place that people can discover online as well as in person.
“It’s important for me to do both and that’s because not everybody can come here. My preference, and I think the reward ratio is much higher, is when you interact in person.”
His current class of about 20 students, for example, is spread out from Europe and England, through North America (Ottawa, Edmonton), Los Angeles, New York, Brazil and all points in between, but Andrew is quick to acknowledge that accessibility is important.
“Accessibility in two senses of the word, in just people being able to access things, so just basically an open door policy; but what’s the point in being able to access something if you can’t make any sense of it? There’s an intellectual accessibility that I think is important.”
One of his goals is to invite artists of various media, musicians, visual artists, artists of all kinds, to enter a work that demonstrates what the medium is the message means today. This will allow an historical artistic record to develop of what the impact of technology is every year and how that shifts and changes.
“In other words, what is our sensorial make-up, what is the effect of technology today and don’t explain it to me, but show me, demonstrate it through music, demonstrate it through visual work, but show me, so every year we can have an in-person and online exhibition.”
“That’s purposefully a very broad category. It doesn’t need to be somebody who has a big record as an artist or an established whatever. In fact, the more immature the better in a certain sense. The key criteria is exploration, so I want it to be open and then have a yearly show.”
“Here I am at TMI trying to be a bridge to the past and the present, and the future,” said Andrew. “Of course, having an idea and making something of it are different things, so the challenge is always, that’s great, but how do you do that, how do you make it sustainable?”
A recording of Andrew McLuhan’s hour-long talk on the McLuhan Institute is expected to the uploaded to the Prince Edward County Public Library website soon. More information on the McLuhan Institute can be found at themcluhaninstitute.com
(Article source tinyurl.com/3zshrr66)
Filed under: Andrew McLuhan, Articles, Commentary, Eric McLuhan, Ideas, New Media, Remembrance, Technology | Closed
Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
This bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.
– Marcellus to Horatio and Bernardo, after seeing the Ghost
(Hamlet, I, i)
HAPPY CHRISTMAS!
A Conversation with the person who knew McLuhan best, his wife Corinne, a Texas-born actress and speech teacher (1912 – 2008)
Filed under: Greetings, information, Interviews, Poetry, Quotations, Remembrance, Video | Closed
McLuhan Galaxy 
B.W. Powe’s New Book, Ladders Made of Water, Reviewed by Robert K. Logan
You’ll find Included in this collection a selection of public presentations and thoughts on our spiritual and ecological crises, including reflections on Jacques Ellul, Simone Weil, Teilhard de Chardin, Marshall McLuhan and Anne Carson, lyrics for an unfinished rock opera, a dramatic homily on Harry Potter, meditations on Dune Part One, Nomadland and Eternals, poems and the parable “Manna”, a Mash-Up of Aphorisms and Fragments, and Biographical Pages on his in-process
work Mysteria.
POW – POWE – POW – Powerful – B.W. Power-full:
A Review of B.W.’s Ladders Made of Water
By Robert K. Logan, Editor of New Explorations
B.W. Powe has done it once again with his new collection of poems, mini-essays, stories, parables, song lyrics, meditations on cinema and our catastrophic moments —questions about our nomad experience of being hurtled into new evolutionary stages. In this short book, Powe takes us to an apocalyptic edge. It’s a step—a streaming—beyond The Charge in the Global Membrane.
As soon as I read the announcement of Ladders Made of Water, I ordered the book and read it in one shot once I received it. You will do the same when you receive the book. It is full of fascinating poetry, poetic images and short scholarly and intellectualy probing essays that both enlighten and delight. A second reading that I read more slowly lingering on the poetry instead of blasting through the text in the excitement of receiving his book revealed more insights. This is a book you will read more than once or twice as I already have.
What is interesting in the book is the B.W. combines his academic scholarship with his poetic sensibility. And not just because this book contains both scholarly essays and poems, but because the academic text is poetic and the poetry contains insights into the nature of media and communications. In fact, it is hard to discern which are the scholarly essays and which are the poems. They morph and bleed into each other.
Consider this example from the essay, A Presentation for the Recalling Jacques Ellul Conference, which contains these three poetic passages: among many others:
From Section 9.
I’m fractalling (is there such a word? I suspect: soon) …
Flight into associating, meaning these links may not be direct—
Setting fractals to float…
And maybe the fragments will sift or roll together—
From section 10.
Ellul, Teilhard, McLuhan, Weil, Carson.
I’m running out of time to talk about them.
Do fractals run out? They spiral on, forward.
Do I aim to convince? I have only moments to relay.
From section 11.
In the five the fire of inward metaphysical vision, and the need to see, counters what can’t be wholly grasped when the present surges so fast we can’t name it. They knew (and know) the world rushes indomitably. The inner fire fades; the world, irrevocably altered in the eschatological story of technology, continues to transit forward. By this I mean the five sensed how our inventions throw us into…
I leave these sentences in an ellipse…
Here is a poem, Fastened to Crystal Tempests and an Aurora Borealis, in which its 8th verse is a mini essay:
We live in a forgetting disunion dissent are part of democracy if we agree to continue with its uncertainties its enigmas its unwritten protocols of trust its
willingness to allow contradictions and ambiguities its paradoxes and its nuances its constant balancing of competing concerns its contingent sense of freedom where we loosely agree to never allow definitions to be totalizing and final
So what is this book Ladders Made of Water?
Poetry – Yes;
Essays – Yes;
Hybrid – Yes;
And an exhilarating trip as you climb B.W. Powe’s Ladders Made of Water –Yes.
See also York University’s YFile Campus information Newsletter: tinyurl.com/5n6s63fj
Filed under: Announcement, Books, BW Powe, Commentary, Education, Ideas, Literature, Poetry, Reviews | Closed