By D.R. Thompson
Depending on who you talk to, media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) was either a visionary or a simplistic slogan-maker. Put another way, his catchy phrases such as ‘the medium is the message’, ‘global village’, ‘cool’ and ‘hot’, while all well-known and used, are not always truly understood by the masses that McLuhan so passionately wrote and thought about, nor unequivocally accepted by academics who generally desire more sophisticated methodologies when trying to make sense of modern media.
Even so, it’s certainly no stretch to say that Marshall McLuhan predicted many of today’s realities (including AI) as they rose out of what he dubbed the electronic age, an age that, according to McLuhan, finds media becoming an extension of the individual’s senses out into the wider world. What is the nature of this age? McLuhan put it this way: “In the electronic age, we wear all of mankind as our skin.”
When we view the daily news, and in a 24/7 ‘just in time’ fashion, this is exactly what happens. We wear the world on our skin every day. To some, we have apparently reached the breaking point of what is acceptable as a common media framework or a ‘common skin’. In fact, many of today’s social trends can be seen as a response to the very effect of an attempt to create such a common skin or perspective and the growing ‘global village’ that McLuhan also predicted.
When I attended film school in the 1980s, McLuhan was not universally well-regarded among the academics I studied with, although he was tolerated and given some air time in our reading and lectures. Today, his reputation grows again as he continues to resonate in particular because of his predictive power — a power, one must surmise, that rose from the critical framework he laid out. As a result, McLuhan continues to attract attention.
One of the more interesting predictions of Marshall McLuhan is one that foreshadows the rise of artificial intelligence. This is what McLuhan said in a talk given to Ohio State University’s Graduate School at a roundtable [this was in 1960] titled “Popular/Mass Culture: American Perspectives”
“If the exercise and exchange of inexhaustible knowledge raises the quality of man, then in the electric age he will have his first universal opportunity to be richly human. But this extension of the human dialogue to embrace all men and all kinds of knowledge may appear to some to turn the globe itself into a single computer”.
To me, this statement is remarkable in a few ways. First, it conveys an optimism that (at the time) McLuhan had for the potential of the electronic, computer age in terms of unleashing human potential. Second, it contains the subtext of how these same technologies could subvert human individualism and Western ideals in unforeseen ways and turn society into ‘a single computer’. A single computer precisely sums up the nature of AI — the omniscience of God, technologically attempted.
What are the implications of such technological omniscience? First, in reality, such an omniscience is possible only by a matter of degree. Moreover, I should mention I’m definitely not the only person to make the connection between McLuhan’s thinking and the predicted rise of AI, omniscient or otherwise. In 2023, Gianluca Riccio in Futuro Prosimmo wrote this:
“Way back in 1966, in a fascinating interview, visionary media theorist Marshall McLuhan talked about the future of information. Surprisingly, some of his ideas resonate in the age of ChatGPT and generative AI. McLuhan envisioned a world where people could request specific information and receive a tailored content package, a concept that brings us back to the capabilities of AI-powered chatbots like Chat GPT.”
But again, what are the implications of the evolution of AI in this way?
For one, it seems to me an appropriate question to ask ChatGPT what does it believe? In other words, what beliefs frame its ‘all-knowing’ qualities? When I asked ChatGPT whether it was a liberal or a conservative and/or what was its worldview, initially a very vocal system error was generated. I then rephrased the question to:
“Does Artificial Intelligence have a world view in your assessment?”
And received this response:
“As an AI language model, I don’t have personal beliefs or subjective experiences, so I don’t possess a worldview in the same way that humans do. I don’t have emotions, desires, or opinions. I can provide information and generate responses based on patterns in the data I was trained on, but it’s important to remember that these responses are not driven by personal perspectives or biases. AI systems can be designed to process and analyze vast amounts of data, recognize patterns, and make predictions or recommendations based on that data, but they lack the ability to form their own independent worldview. The outputs of AI systems are ultimately shaped by the data they have been trained on and the algorithms that govern their functioning.”
This feedback is important. The media, when taken as a whole, will ideally create a balanced (and in this way neutral) window into the world. To the extent that media realizes this potential, it truly becomes the ‘extension to the senses’ that McLuhan speaks of. If not, then what is reflected in the media is usually an implicit background bias with often dubious intent. Truth, in such a fragmented media world, will remain elusive and constantly under assault. Today, even facts become debatable”…
Read the rest at https://aninjusticemag.com/did-mcluhan-predict-artificial-intelligence-e61901574b15
See the following video on ChatGPT Explained Completely…
Filed under: Academic, AI, Articles, Commentary, Future, Ideas, New Media, Technology | Closed
Bob Logan in a familiar presentation stance
The Medium and the Light Award for 2023
By Howard R. Engel
The recipient of the twelfth Medium and the Light Award, in recognition of the ecumenical dimensions of the life and work of Marshall McLuhan, was presented on Thursday, June 22 as a concurrent session of the 24th Media Ecology Association (MEA) Convention held in person at Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus with the overall theme of “Arts/Symbol/Context/ Meanings”. This was the sixth time that The Medium and the Light Award was conferred at a MEA Convention, the other years being 2014, 2017, 2020, 2021, and 2022.
Dr. Robert K. Logan is the recipient of this year’s Award for so effectively and faithfully inviting others to join him in probing the many effects of our mediated world on human beings through a lifetime of work inspired by his friend Marshall McLuhan’s own explorations. McLuhan mentored him to understand particularly the figure/ground effects of technologies, especially communication media, on human beings. According to Award nominator, Alex Kuskis, “Since McLuhan’s passing in 1980, Bob Logan has done the most to support McLuhan’s reputation and legacy than any other scholar, except perhaps for Eric McLuhan, who I contend did the most.” [Interestingly, Bob was the one who nominated Eric for this award back in 2012!]
“Having published nearly 100 analytical essays explaining aspects of McLuhan’s media thinking and over a dozen books that are fully or at least partly concerned with McLuhan’s thought, Bob Logan is worthy of recognition for his work…” The Award is usually given annually by The Marshall McLuhan Initiative that was affiliated for its first decade (2007-2017) with St Paul’s College, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. The University of Manitoba is Marshall McLuhan’s first post-secondary alma mater, where he earned the Gold Medal in Arts for 1933 and an M.A. in English literature (1934).
The award consists of:
• A crystal-clear soda glass obelisk (measuring ca. 2 x 2 x 8 inches and 3 pounds in weight)
• Embedded in a piece of opalescent dichroic glass
• On which the pebble-in-the-pond logo of the Marshall McLuhan Initiative has been etched.
• This dichroic glass has a very thin multi-metal coating that refracts light in many different colours.
• Both the award and recipients’ names are etched horizontally on the obelisk’s surface.
Bob Logan’s Acceptance Comments:
I am very touched and also humbled to be the recipient of the 2023 Medium and the Light Award and thank all those who made this possible especially Howard R. Engel for organizing this and Alex Kuskis who nominated me and whom I will nominate for this award in 2024 for all he has done for media ecology. Unfortunately, I cannot be in NYC in late June. I spend the summers in Romania with my Romanian wife Maria Lelenszky Logan in her hometown Oradea in the heart of Transylvania where we have an apartment and enjoy time at the thermal baths here and in an orchard we just purchased in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains just 20 minutes from our apartment. I will be here in Romania until Sept 9. Trans-Atlantic flights are a bit taxing on me at my age. I can handle two a year back and forth because I have enough time to recover from the jet lag. But to do a 4 or 5 day turn around to make it to New York City would be too much for me. I might have considered it, but it is impossible for another reason. As it happens, I have accepted 3 months ago to be a keynote invited speaker in Bucharest at a semiotics conference which will be my introduction to my Romanian colleagues in communications. The time of this conference almost exactly overlaps the MEA conference. I am therefore unable to accept the award in person at the MEA convention and be with my many friends at MEA. My talk in Bucharest will be about how there should be a greater overlap and reconciliation between media ecology and semiotics. I will be publishing my talk in the journal New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication of which I am the founding editor. New Explorations is a revival of the Carpenter McLuhan journal Explorations. Sending my warm regards from Transylvania to all the MEA participants in New York City………Bob Logan
Filed under: Academic, Announcement, Award, Education, Media Ecology, Scholars, Univertsity | Closed
Only a few Canadian universities offer an undergraduate course on Marshall McLuhan and far fewer, maybe none, offer a course that covers the thought of both Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. York University in North Toronto does, taught by the course’s creator B.W. Powe, who studied with both famous scholars at the University of Toronto. The course is being offered again starting this September, with McLuhan covered in the Fall semester and Frye in the Spring. Furthermore, this course is being offered in a synchronous online mode, enabling anyone with an Internet-connected computer to take the course from anywhere in the world. And if you’re not needing to get a credit for taking this course, but want the knowledge, it can be audited. Please contact the English Department at York University for information. What follows here is the course syllabus, prepared by B.W. Powe.
4004 Course Description, Fall/Winter (2023-2024)
Format: Online, synchronous
Time: Thursdays 11:30 am until 2:30 pm
Course Director: B.W. Powe
Apocalypse and Alchemy: this course explores the Canadian visionary presence of Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. It’s devoted to engaging the perceptions and thoughts, the provocative and inspiring works of these hugely influential thinkers of mass media and the role of literature. We’ll study their seminal impact on writers and artists, and how literary and cinema works reflect and evoke their imaginative, prophetic propositions.
In Term One we focus on McLuhan, the inventor of Media Ecology. Our text will be The Book of Probes. We’ll examine his most well-known aphorisms, and the explorations and discoveries he made into the hyper-media realm. In McLuhan’s writing in elliptical epigrams, fragments, mixed modes, what he called probes, he recorded the breakthroughs of new media and their effects on sensibilities and consciousness.
McLuhan sought codes that operated through the effects of electronic media. He called electronic media the new texts of Nature—a second creation. His work took on poetic eloquence and allusiveness. Can he be understood as our first poet-theorist of media?
We’ll discuss McLuhan’s attempts to frame a Media Ecology for the new environments that communication technologies—AI, ChatGPT4, Bing and Bard, TV, PCs, radio—generate. We also focus on his last urgent utterances and their prophetic attempts to awaken media users.
Term Two is devoted to exploring works by Northrop Frye. Frye’s defense of deep reading centres on the cultivation and practice of imaginative inwardness.
Frye’s studies began in the poetry and art of William Blake in the canon-changing book, Fearful Symmetry. In that work Frye presents the awareness that there is a deep underlying mythic-poetic-structure to literature. We’ll explore how imaginative-spiritual knowledge burst through in his work, beginning with The Educated Imagination, The Double Vision, and especially The Great Code. In these he asks, why read? What is the importance of cultivating literary inwardness? His books teach us to become aware of what words can do to enhance consciousness.
Frye sought aesthetic unity behind chaos to present principles of awareness and perception through transformations of the meaning of poetics. We’ll call his approach Literary Ecology. He thought the cosmos could be comprehended through the codes buried in the metaphors of literary works. We’ll concentrate on his synoptic works The Educated Imagination, The Double Vision, and The Great Code.
We’ll engage their conflicting rhetorical approaches: McLuhan, the prankster and punster, the prophet of e-media and the subliminal environments of electricity; Frye, the seemingly detached scholar whose muted prose masked heretical thinking, sublime intentions. Both are obsessed with the meaning of the word, “apocalypse”; both sometimes at odds with each other. What do their inspirations and observations, their pursuits of codes and laws, say to us now? Is there something audaciously Canadian in their alchemies?
Filed under: Academic, Announcement, Education, Ideas, information, Literature, Media Ecology, New Media, Remembrance, Scholars, Students, Toronto School, university | Closed
Harley Parker by Yousuf Karsh © Yousuf Karsh Estate
The discovery of McLuhan collaborator Harley Parker’s Culture Box after 50 years should inspire other scholarly sleuths.
BY GARY GENESKO | JUN 07, 2023
Many “lost” manuscripts are literary works, while lost audiovisual media run a close second. Then there is a lost work of media criticism from the Toronto School of Communication, the name given to a scholarly community that developed at the University of Toronto between the 1930s and the 1970s. Lost for 50 years – from the time of the announcement of its imminent publication by Harper & Row Publishers, with an excerpt in 1972 – the manuscript of Harley W. Parker’s book, The Culture Box: Museums are today has resurfaced and awaits publication.
While it is rare that a book manuscript of this sort turns up after so many decades, it should inspire anyone engaged in scholarly sleuth work to stay the course.
Canadian typographer, painter and exhibition designer Parker was media thinker Marshall McLuhan’s collaborator and right-hand man. He was popularly known as the “McLuhan of the museum”. Parker’s career as general display chief at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto stretched from 1957-1968, and the experimental gallery he mounted at the Museum of the City of New York in 1967 was a touchpoint for his progressive ideas about museums as perceptual laboratories.
The story of my attempt to find the lost manuscript begins in 2012. I initially discovered that Parker’s youngest son, Eric, lived close to me in Toronto. He graciously participated in a small seminar on his father that my colleague, art historian Adam Lauder, and I held in Oshawa, and brought to our attention a Yousef Karsh portrait photograph of his father, the existence of which not even the Karsh Estate knew about. It was a pleasant surprise, wrapped in a larger mystery.
I learned a few years later that The Culture Box manuscript might not actually be permanently missing. Monica Carpendale, based in Nelson, BC, the widow of Parker’s late eldest son Blake, confirmed that she had seen it among Parker’s belongings at some point after his passing in 1992.
I was inspired by this confirmation and began to enlist more interlocutors, keeping in mind the twists and turns that the passage of time could bring into play.
It was only once I had begun corresponding with Parker’s youngest child, his daughter Margaret in 2017, that I began to piece together the story.
It turned out that it was Margaret who stored her father’s belongings in her house. But she did not know that they included a lost book manuscript. I had a hunch it might be tucked away in one of the boxes. With my encouragement and armed with what I had told her about it, Margaret found the manuscript in early April 2022, and a preliminary scanned copy was sent to me shortly thereafter.
Margaret explains the discovery: “The Culture Box manuscript along with a few other papers was found in an old-fashioned hard-shell briefcase. This was stored in my house in Vallican, BC along with some of Harley’s other stuff.”
The manuscript of The Culture Box is a 350-page typescript; the pages appear to be renumbered by hand several times. The text has been copyedited, and there are few corrections. The challenge is to reconstruct all of the footnotes and other references; there were quotations from many different sources, but no complete citations. This task fell to me.
Parker took up the year-long position of William Kern visiting professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in January of 1973. The last three chapters of The Culture Box are marked by hand as “good copy”, dated February 1973. He was still finalizing the text while commuting to Rochester from Toronto. No one I have reached remembers him teaching from this manuscript at that time.
What is in The Culture Box?
The book argues that museums are in the business of retraining the perception of visitors. In order to accomplish this, Parker recommends the construction of what he called a “new centre,” emphasizing both “new” and “news”, essentially a small “newseum”, preferably built adjacent to any existing large prestige museum that would consist of a current public exhibition; an exhibition in process; and an area for gathering materials for a new exhibition.
The goal of this emphasis on exhibit process in the present is to re-orientate museum visitors by managing the degree of contrast between the everyday cultures they inhabit, and the cultures they will encounter in museum displays. Parker uses a gradual approach to managing contrast, beginning with significant world events in the new centre, then moving away from the contemporary into greater degrees of contrast in the museum proper. One of his keywords is a “new ordering,” which he aligns with art’s capacity to shift away from everyday life, culminating in a reflexive and empathic visitor experience of cultural distance and difference.
The Culture Box is an important precursor to the later emergence of the multi-sensory museum concept, in which his writings and exhibitions have been rarely mentioned. The publication of this book will contribute to restoring the significance of his contributions to sensory museology and of museums as systems of non-linear communication, as well as the importance of the liminal spaces to visitor experience”…
READ THE REST IN: https://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-opinion/when-a-lost-manuscript-turns-up/
Harley Parker self-portrait
Filed under: Academic, Articles, artists, Books, Collaborators, Commentary, Education, Ideas, Influenced by McLuhan, Publishing, Remembrance, Scholars, Toronto School | Closed
Professor B. W. Powe will be giving the Joyce-Bloomsday Talk via Zoom on from Cordoba, Spain on Monday, June 12th, at 2 pm to the Festival Bloomsday Montreal. His presentation will engage Ulysses/Finnegans Wake—day/night visions/Cosmopolis/ Zamizdat Publishing—Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, published at first in limited editions by a tiny press/Joyce’s rivering-seering insights into the Global snapshotprofileallatoncemultivoices. Of course, references will be there for Marshall McLuhan, who had an exceptionally dedicated interest in the work of James Joyce.
This Academic Day Afternoon session will be presented at 2 PM on Monday June 12 at Concordia University, in the McEntee Reading Room and online via Zoom.
REGISTER for B.W. Powe’s talk at https://mpulsionservices.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_y-C-FEUnTtCeipWZSpZTpw#/registration
About Bloomsday Montréal
We are the largest Bloomsday festival in Canada with event-filled days that stretch over seven days. We bring down the curtain on Bloomsday itself — June 16. Over the years, festival-goers have come to enjoy an expanding variety of educational, cultural and social events.
The first Bloomsday Montréal Festival was a three-day event held in June 2012. Administered by the McGill School for Continuing Studies, many key Montréal educational and cultural institutions participated in its first success.
In October 2014, Festival Bloomsday Montréal became a registered non-profit organization, managed and organized entirely by volunteers. All funds derived from donations and registrations are used to produce the festival. Activities are open to the public and most are free of charge.
The full 7-day schedule for Festival Bloomsday Montreal is at https://bloomsdaymontreal.com/
To attend or view via Zoom other scheduled events please reserve your place under the specific event described in the schedule.
Marshall McLuhan & James Joyce, a watercolour by Joan Steacy
Filed under: Announcement, BW Powe, Conferences, Education, Ideas, Media Events, Scholars, Webinar, Writers | Closed
Review of LADDERS MADE OF WATER
By Bill Kuhns
May 6, 2023
What a stunning discovery! How do we counter the rise of a soon-to-become superior intelligence — A.I. – amplified and surrounded by other supernal threats: of Pandemic, war, fascism, and planetary meltdown? Powe proposes the wisest strategy I’ve yet encountered to our era’s many grave dangers. He writes that “the alchemical opus” – the all-or-nothing requirement this hour makes of us – is in “cultivating depths during our time of technological expansion.”
Those very technologies, of course, promise fresh sources of distraction and further delegation of skills and abilities and mental acuteness that are inimical to the depth-seeking Powe invites us to attempt.
As its title suggests, Ladders Made of Water encourages us to cultivate depths by learning, simultaneously, to dive deep and ascend. By doing both, Powe proposes, we can surmount and prevail over these threats all but engulfing us.
This book of poems, reflections, and aphorisms is a beautifully written roadmap – dare I say, survival guide? – into cultivating those depths.
The writing is lucid and searching, delicately probing a mysterious realm of shifting questions rather than seeking out the hard-trodden firmament of rooted answers. Powe’s questioning is so visionary and wide-eyed it carries echoes of William Blake. “What are the inspirations that we need to preserve… / Inside vistas that may be whirling too wide”
Here is a work of rare moral and spiritual force, deeply true to its moment, luminous with flashpoints that I believe can serve as navigational starlight in that strange new darkness fast descending all around us. – Bill Kuhns
Filed under: Books, BW Powe, Education, Ideas, Literature, Poetry, Reviews, Writers | Closed
By Thomas Cooper PhD,
Emeritus Professor, Emerson College
When you are reading LADDERS MADE OF WATER, you are immersing yourself in one of the great poetic minds of our century. I love Powe’s writing and hope you’ll buy this book. Both of us were students of Marshall McLuhan, and B.W’s writing about the Man of LaManitoba (McLuhan) is among the most knowledgeable, sensitive, and helpful. Powe wrote the definitive book about the McLuhan-Frye relationship and is an important, top commentator about the poets, artists, and communication of our day. A professor at York, BW is also a masterful teacher, so using his books in the classroom is a real plus for students. LADDERS MADE OF WATER has my highest recommendation.
Filed under: Books, BW Powe, Education, Ideas, Literature, Poetry, Reviews, Writers | Closed
An Official ICA2023 and CCA2023 Pre-Conference
Between the 1930s and 1970s, a remarkable intellectual climate coalesced within and around the U of Toronto when intellectual giants Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, Northrop Frye, Marshall McLuhan, Glenn Gould, among others, captured the global imagination. This scholarly community came to be known as “The Toronto School of Communication”, achieving international recognition for its innovative and trans-disciplinary approaches to emerging social and cultural challenges. It gave voice to a transforming vision of perception and social order brought about by the evolving possibilities of interconnectivity enmeshed in developing media technologies and creative energy. This one-day ICA pre-conference on “The Toronto School of Communication: A Global Legacy”, presented by St. Michael’s College in the U of Toronto, aims to foster the making of an intellectual community that will serve as a source of knowledgeable energy and encouragement for international research connections around the global legacy of the Toronto School of Communication.
Sponsored by St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto
In collaboration with the Centre for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto
Official ICA2023 pre-conference event
Keynotes: Derrick De Kerckhove, William Buxton
Date & time: Wed, May 24, 2023, 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM EDT
Location: The Centre for Culture and Technology – University of Toronto, 39A Queen’s Park Crescent East. Toronto, ON, M5S 2C3
Filed under: Academic, Announcement, Conferences, Education, Ideas, Media Ecology, Scholars, St Michael's College, Theory, Toronto School, university | Closed
A special talk with Philippine ABS-CBN broadcast journalist and McLuhan Award Winner (2022) for Investigative Journalism Karmina Constantino.
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Brennan Hall, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto
Filed under: Academic, Announcement, Education, Invitation, journalism, Lectures, McLuhan Salons, St Michael's College, university | Closed
McLuhan Galaxy 
New Book Announcement: Beyond Media Literacy
By Lars C. Grabbe, Andrew McLuhan, & Tobias Held (Eds.)
The interplay of physical reality and media environments is getting enhanced by new technological innovations. We are living in the age of digital aesthetics and there is a need for individual, cultural, or social forms and variations of media literacy. This book seeks the limits of media literacies, and to go beyond them. »Beyond Media Literacy« contributes to the wide range of media literacy discourse with approaches in modern media theory, philosophy, art and film theory, computer graphics as well as the complex range of modern aesthetics. This volume monitors and discusses the relation of media and literacy in the context of media as environments with effects on psyche and society.
Andrew McLuhan in an email has stated that this new book “is an outgrowth of [his] 2021 essay, ‘Macro Media Literacy’ published on medium.com),” which you can find here: https://medium.com/@andrewmcluhan/macro-media-literacy-f6352e085c3a. In the last paragraph of his essay, Andrew wrote:
“I am suggesting that we enlarge what is conventionally considered and taught as media literacy to include both a broader understanding of what constitutes ‘media’ as well as a broader understanding of what their ‘messages’ are to include what happens when you shift attention from the content to the form, from the content creators and purveyors to the effects on the user/receiver beyond intentional persuasion and toward the more profound cognitive, sensory, and societal changes which are generally ‘unintended consequences’ or ‘side effects’ but when added up vastly overpower whatever was intended.”
Andrew states what some other media ecologists who study McLuhan’s thinking on education, including yours truly, think about media literacy, namely, that the way it has developed is short of where it should be and that it falls short of “understanding media,” the goal of media ecology. Therefore, it needs to be expanded. Presumably, that is what this new book, “Beyond Media Literacy” is about.
Filed under: Academic, Andrew McLuhan, Announcement, Books, Commentary, Education, Ideas, Influenced by McLuhan, Media Literacy, New Media, Scholars, Technology | Closed