The Passing of Michael Tad Edmunds, University of Toronto’s First Director of the Information Commons

21Feb24

Michael Tad Edmunds (Nov. 5, 1941 – Jan. 13, 2024)

Michael Tad Edmunds, husband, father, grandfather, friend, colleague, neighbour, singer, photographer, student of McLuhan, and the builder and first director of The Information Commons, died at Mt. Sinai Hospital on Saturday, January 13, 2024, from Small Cell Lung Cancer (SCLC). He was 82. The doctors said that even though he had quit smoking almost fifty years prior, this cancer was caused 100% by smoking (he had grown up with lots of second-hand smoke and smoked as a teen until into his thirties before he finally quit forever). He was diagnosed with stage four cancer in March 2023 and given the difficult news that the aggressive cancer was not curable. Nevertheless, Michael maintained an attitude of optimism and managed to enjoy himself in the time he had, and even be happy. His hope was to gain as much time to live and be with his family and friends as possible. He was especially grateful to wife Carol who accompanied him on each step of his journey, Cousin Frank and neighbour Mike who drove him to and from most of his appointments, and Bernie who made many Sunday night dinners for him and his family.

Michael was born in the USA (Detroit, Michigan) to Gertrude (nee Sterbenz) and Charles Edmunds who had migrated from the coal mines of California, Pennsylvania to the assembly lines of the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. His father was of Welsh ancestry and his mother of German.

Michael was predeceased by his younger brother Terry Oliver, whom he greatly missed. Michael in turn is terribly missed by his wife of 58 years, Carol, his sons Roland, Matthew, and Jason, and his partner Danni Dickson, and his grandchildren Madelyn Rose, Rowan Lark, and Leif Parker Llewelyn.

Michael grew up in southwest Detroit. His difficult childhood became more challenging when his father died of a heart attack when Michael was only eleven. Michael and Terry lived with an aunt for six months in California, Pennsylvania and attended school there; in the summer, they returned to Detroit. Since money was scarce, Michael got a job selling newspapers on a corner and called out “News, Times, Free Press” every night until he sold out, and then went home with a box of cookies for himself and Terry.

After high school, Michael attended Wayne State University (WSU). To pay the tuition, he did various jobs, and got government loans. He worked as a house painter with an uncle, a shipping clerk, an assembly line worker at Ford Motor Company, and did some lighting for Wayne State University T.V. productions. While he was at the Ford Motor Company in the summer, another worker heard him singing on the line and said, “If I had a voice like that, I wouldn’t stay here,” but Michael would not explore his musical talent until later in his life.

Michael majored in speech and media and graduated from WSU with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and a Teaching Certificate; he got a job teaching English and Speech in a high school in southwest Detroit. After a day of teaching, he and some other teachers would regularly play basketball with the students. Michael always said that in another life, he would have loved to have been a basketball player.

While studying at WSU, Michael met Carol Schultz and on September 24, 1966, they married. They lived on campus and experienced firsthand the racial unrest of the summer of 1967, hearing machine gun fire all night and seeing tanks roll by their front windows. They were both working as teachers and decided to save their money and move to Toronto, Canada, where they had visited Carol’s Cousin Frank. On August 1, 1971, they packed up their two cars, a Plymouth Valiant and a Dodge van, and drove to the border and immigrated. Michael got a job at the Media Centre at U of T. He had a keen interest in U of T because Marshall McLuhan worked there.

Michael and Carol began their family in 1972 with the birth of Jason, and then Roland in 1975, and Matthew in 1980. During those years, Michael got a Master of Education at OISE (now part of U of T). Michael yearned to do something more challenging and to make a better income for his family, so he regularly applied for jobs at other institutions. In 1981, he was offered a position at the University of Victoria in B.C., which interested him because they planned to build a production studio to augment their Media department. He and his family moved to Victoria, but a sudden budget cut removed the planned production unit that had been the main attraction for Michael. After four months, they returned to Toronto.

Michael was able to negotiate a return to the Media Centre and eventually started working at a new position as a producer/director in the production centre (something he had wanted to try); however, they would not find stability yet.  Soon there was a big re-org at the university and Michael lost his job because the production centre was going to be cut, but eventually Michael was chosen to become the Director of the new Media Centre. Michael said he spent several anxious weeks and did a lot of running with his gym friends to stay calm between the time of losing his job and getting a better job.

During the time he worked at U of T, Michael usually spent his lunch hours working out with weights with a small group of friends. On alternate days, they would run or do circuits. Afterwards, they would have soup and sandwich together. Michael enjoyed this a lot, and it was a good mid-day break.

He enjoyed his new job and had his own style.  Colleague Robert Fysh said that “as a boss, he recognized the skills, talents, and interests of his staff and once we were assigned a task would let us achieve the set goals with only the necessary supervision.” Antonio Mendonca echoed that when he said, “His style of management was hands-off, delegating things rather than micromanaging. He saw the big picture ahead of others, always keeping a critical eye on perspectives and perceptions as challenges came along.” He was flexible and his confidence in people helped them to work with enthusiasm and creativity.

Michael gradually became interested in computers and electronic classrooms. According to colleague Robert Fysh, “…Michael had the vision to recognize that emerging technologies would be a force for change in the educational environment. He promoted and instituted the use of technologies that we take for granted…” He applied what he learned as well as his knowledge of the work of Marshall McLuhan to this field. In the summer of 1994, he was working with a small, new committee, TFELS, The Task Force on the Electronic Library System and made many important contributions, as shown by internal emails and memorandums. Many reports and meetings led to the decision to create an information common.

Michael was chosen to lead a team to build an information common in the library. The project was called Get It Done. Michael would be the Director of the new Information common, of which there was only one other in North America. As he had no real models to look at, he would have to make it up as he went along, but that is what he had done for most of his life, so he was the right person for this job. It began one of the most intense periods of his career.

Finally, in September 1995, The Information Commons opened, and Michael began his work. Sian Meikle and Marcel Fortin, current directors said, “Michael led the formation of the Information Commons, and he provided wonderful vision as its founding director, from 1995 to 2010. His leadership guided the university community through the suddenly burgeoning role of technology in our lives, and what a herculean task that was! In those early days of the internet, we all had everything to learn, and nothing to use…” (Marcel also commented on Michael’s “great sense of humour”, which he would appreciate.) Michael enjoyed the work immensely; it was interesting and creative and allowed him to see some of his ideas come to life. The Information Commons changed many things and was a huge contribution to the life of the university.

Besides work, Michael enjoyed spending time with his family and friends, going to the cottage in summer, fall, spring, and even winter. He was also fascinated by the work of Marshall McLuhan – he had met him, taken a course with him, and read books and articles. However, what gave him the most joy was music, and particularly singing. As a child he had loved music, singing, and dancing. At school, he was chosen to learn the violin, but his father could not stand to listen to him practicing and made him quit. Later, as a teen, he and his friends often gathered in storefronts (for the acoustics) and sang harmony, and popular doo-wop songs. In his thirties he took guitar lessons and sang, but in his early fifties, after a friend who played the violin for the Canadian Opera Company heard him sing and noted his unique timbre, he began taking voice lessons and performing as a solo singer, in musicals, operettas, and choirs with a community theatre group, or sang popular music in various venues. He was especially good at singing rhythm and blues type songs. Various professionals praised his musicality and rich, warm tenor voice. When he auditioned for Opera in Concert, Robert Cooper listened to him and then asked, “Who are you?” surprised that he had never heard of him before. He loved to perform and connect with people in an audience. One can see/hear him sing Spring Is Here with the Mississauga Brass Band by googling Michael Edmunds Spring is Here, or on his YouTube channel – Mepicks/youtube/Spring Is Here (which leads us to another one of his interests).

While at U of T, Michael was Producer/Director of hundreds of educational, archival, and promotional videos for many departments, like the Centre for Medieval Studies and the Department of Italian Studies, and some for science, such as one on the discovery of penicillin. After retirement, Michael continued to explore his interest in images, and was inspired to make and post videos of Jason’s band, The Lazy Devils. Michael filmed, edited, and enhanced the videos and posted them on his Mepicks/youtube channel.

Shortly before Michael retired, he and Carol bought a house at the northeast edge of Peterborough near Trent University. They started going there every weekend and for weeks at a time over Christmas and in the summer and were able to be with family and grandchildren. They all (adults, grandchildren, and dogs) often walked on the Trent Trail with its varied terrain of meadows with swallows, to ponds with beavers, to forests with porcupines – fields, hills, ridges, valleys, and thick forests made for a challenging hike, especially in winter. Later Michael and Carol took over the care of Danni’s dog, Mick, and back in Toronto, they often walked in the forest at Cedarvale.

     Michael was a positive, joyful, optimistic, fun-loving, and flexible person. He was very accepting of different ways of doing things, felt deeply and usually with kindness, and understanding. After Michael’s diagnosis of cancer, the life he had known exploded, but his bravery and leadership regarding it, helped his family to navigate their new present and future. Toward the end of his life, he said several times that he was amazed and happy with what he and Carol had created. He had time to say important things to everyone in his family, and in the end, he showed his Welsh ancestry; and as per the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, he did “not go gentle into that good night.” He had things to do, and he wanted more time, as who would not? His family loved him, and he is deeply missed every day.

There will be a celebration of Michael’s life in the spring. Email Carol (carol_edmunds@hotmail.com) to be notified. If you wish to donate to a charity in Michael’s name, please contact Princess Margaret Foundation, by calling 416-946-6560 and donate to Lung Cancer Radiation Therapy Research Fund where Michael’s very kind doctor (Dr Rahman) and another doctor are involved in research on SCLC.  Carol selected this charity because only 15% of all lung cancers are caused by this very aggressive small cell lung cancer, so not much research has been done on it.

 

 

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Building Communities: The Evolving Role of Journalists in Covering Human Rights Stories in the Philippines

13Feb24

By Jodesz Gavilan
2023 Marshall McLuhan Fellow
Notes from her Lecture in Canada 2024

Last year, I met a mother who lost three loved ones in one night. Her husband, son-in-law, and brother were killed by unknown men inside their own home. They were begging for mercy for them to be spared, but they were repeatedly shot at close range.

This all happened while the women and children in the family were held hostage in one of the rooms. They heard everything,  the screams, the cries, the gunshots, and then the silence. She had no choice but to leave everything behind. The house she lived in for close to five decades, the community she knew all her life. The livelihood that supported her family. She packed her bags and took her surviving relatives to a settlement area two hours away from their former home.

And since then, she has had to find ways to come up with money for rent, food, and other necessities for seven people. She has not even dealt with the trauma, or even thought of getting justice for her slain loved ones. The mother’s story is not unique. Their experiences reflect what thousands of other families went through because of Rodrigo Duterte’s violent war on drugs.

At least 6,000 people were killed in police operations alone. If you include those killed vigilante-style, or whose bodies were found on the street, the death toll is estimated to reach 30,000.

This has been my job for the past seven years or so as a human rights reporter for Rappler. I go to the families after the killing, after the death anniversaries to see how they are doing, how are they coping in the aftermath, or how they are trying to find justice.

I do this because I want to put on record that the impact of Duterte’s drug war did not stop when the body was buried. The impact manifests itself in the form of thousands of orphaned children forced to drop out of school, or on mothers left with no choice but to seek greener pastures and leave their children behind.

This is how I view my work as a journalist. While I have to also cover policies and institutions, I make sure that I put people at the center of my stories. For me, that is what human rights reporting should do. At the end of the day, a reader’s main takeaway should be how the policies affect the vulnerable communities.

I do not see it as giving voice to the voiceless, because the families of victims have the agency to do their own talking. Instead, I just amplify their calls and their stories. This is where I see my role now as a journalist. I am a part of a community committed to bring forward the issues, and not some sort of a messiah that would magically fix things.

This was not an easy thing to do. It took years and years of practice to do it. And these are the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

1. Building trust is part of journalism.

A huge part of journalism is building trust on different facets. There is the part that you have to make your audience trust you as a credible source of news. There’s also the fact that you have to earn the trust of your editors.

But I’d like to focus on one aspect: Ensuring that the people at the center of your stories see you as someone trustworthy.  This is important not only because you need to get the story of them, but because they have to see you as someone not just as a journalist, but as a human who wants to listen to their stories. Journalism, especially human rights reporting, is not just a one-off thing. You just don’t go to a community, get your soundbite or quote, and then leave. It is not only lazy, but a disservice to the people who are willing to tell you their stories.

Before you could get to them, you have to go through layers to establish your credibility and build trust. I first experienced this when I was starting out as a journalist back in 2014, even before the Duterte years. I covered the issue of hunger and malnutrition in the country’s poorest neighborhoods. My work led me to connect with various civil society organizations that implemented projects in these areas, and in turn, also to the people they are helping.

Fast forward to the Duterte presidency, some of the groups I previously worked with are also the ones involved in helping drug war victims’ families. Unfortunately, some of the families I talked to before also became victims themselves. So because I already have that level of trust built, I was able to write about them. But in cases where I have no prior connection to, I start from the beginning.

Why is this important? You have to remember that what you’re getting from human rights victims are not just a random opinion on a general issue. You are asking them to remember what could be the worst experience they’ve had in their lives, and that would entail…[unfinished thought.] It is through this that we see beyond the walls they built in  response to the traumatic events that they experienced.

2. It is okay to feel about your story.
   

The second lesson I’ve learned is that it is vital that we feel strongly about our stories, or the issue we are reporting on. Being apathetic, or being too far removed, leaves a sense that you’re just there to write and nothing more. When you let yourself feel things in the process, it radiates in the way you handle everything. That includes from the interviews to the writing itself. With so much sensitivity, respect, and that intense desire to give justice to the trust given to you by the families.

3. The journalism process does not stop when a story is published. It is just (almost) the beginning.

Stop thinking that once the story is published in the newspaper, or on the internet, that it is out of our hands. That is something that Filipino journalists have long grappled with. But fortunately, many are embracing the value of seeing journalism as bigger than published stories.

So what usually happens is when a story is published, I make sure that I make derivatives out of it. I make videos or even Tiktok because these target certain generations that my articles alone cannot reach.

You also have to ensure that the readers know what to do. And it’s sometimes as simple as putting action points in your stories. An example is this is how I placed information on how people donate to an organization that helps families of drug war victims exhume their loved and give them a proper burial.

Here is another example. I did not explicitly say in my story that people should donate. But I included how important support from communities is for those left behind. Someone got that cue and reached out if I could connect them to the victim so they could give them a scholarship.

You should also see how to elevate or increase the discourse on the issues raised in your stories. And this could be done by simply partnering with groups and idea-based communities where they could discuss among themselves.

You also need to acknowledge the huge role the government could do if it plays its cards right. So as a journalist, we have to shed that automatic animosity and just reach out to them and hope for the best.

By doing all of these, you highlight the role of the community in bringing forward more discussion points on the issues you’ve written about. To acknowledge that you do not have all the answers is not an admission of failure, but a door opening to greater community building.

4. Remove the barrier between journalists and readers.

 Speaking of doors, a good step towards community building is to remove barriers between journalists and readers. You have to make readers feel and see that you are not on your ivory tower, you are part of the community they could easily give feedback to, or even throw at story ideas.

At Rappler, we recently launched an application where readers could easily talk to us journalists. You just download the app, join the issue-based community you want to be a part of, and Rappler journalists covering those issues are always there to answer any question. When you do these, you make the readers feel that they are part of the community. That they too could do something about the issues they are also seeing.

5. Know your limitations, as a journalist and a human being.

Because at the end of a day, a journalist could only do so much. And it takes a village, a community, to spark change. I went into journalism believing that I could change the world. But I came to realize that you can’t save everybody. That doesn’t make me less of a journalist.

I’ve come to base my worth on the simple things. When my story leads to a family receiving necessary support, that is already a huge thing. The feeling I get when that happens is similar to what I feel when you find out that the stories I’ve written were cited in various legal documents at the International Criminal Courts and the United Nations.

So what can you do?

You have to see yourself as a member of the community. You’re not just a spectator. The issues I’m writing about as a human rights reporter will mostly affect people outside of the usual communities. And lastly, please support journalism.

Thank you.

ABOUT JODESZ GAVILAN
Jodesz Gavilan is a writer and researcher for Rappler and its investigative arm, Newsbreak. She covers the human rights and impunity beats, producing in-depth and investigative reports, particularly on the quest for justice of victims of former president Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs and war on dissent. She also closely follows international bodies such as the International Criminal Court and the United Nations Human Rights Council.

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This Book Club Finally Finished Reading “Finnegans Wake” After 28 Years

08Feb24

The group, which calls itself the Marshall McLuhan/Finnegans Wake Reading Club, in Venice, California, started the difficult James Joyce book in 1995. They reached its final page during last October. What’s the connection between Marshall McLuhan and James Joyce’s writing? McLuhan was fascinated with the writings of James Joyce at a time that few in North America knew much about Joyce and his few great books. McLuhan was especially intrigued by Finnegans Wake. He wrote: “Nobody could pretend serious interest in my work who is not completely familiar with all of the works of James Joyce and the French symbolists.” – Marshall McLuhan

By Lois Beckett

For a quarter century, Gerry Fialka, an experimental film-maker from Venice, California, has hosted a book club devoted to a single text: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, one of the most famously difficult texts in literary history.

Starting in 1995, between 10 and 30 people would show up to monthly meetings at a local library. At first they read two pages a month, eventually slowing to just one page per discussion. At that pace, the group – which now meets on Zoom – reached the final page in October. It took them 28 years.

That amount of time “could well be a record”, said Sam Slote, a Joyce expert at Trinity College, Dublin, and one of the editors of How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake. His own weekly Wake group in Dublin, which is made up of about a dozen Joyce scholars, is on track to read through the text in a brisk 15 years.

The California reading group spent longer reading Finnegans Wake than Joyce spent writing it: the 628-page experimental text took the author 17 years to complete, Slote said, including a four-year stretch of near-complete writer’s block.

Fialka, who started the group in his early 40s, is now 70. “I don’t want to lie, it wasn’t like I saw God,” Fialka said, of reaching the book’s end. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

While Joyce’s Ulysses has a reputation as a difficult novel, Slote said, Finnegans Wake is “a whole different level”, with ongoing debate over basic points such as where and when the novel is set, or who the characters are. It is written in a mishmash of reinvented words, puns and allusions, with references to roughly 80 different languages.

“When people hear you’ve been a member of a book club that reads the same book every time you meet, most people go, ‘Why would you do that?’” said Bruce Woodside, a 74-year-old retired Disney animator who joined Fialka’s reading group in the 1990s. Though “it’s 628 pages of things that look like typographic errors”, said Woodside, who has been reading and re-reading Finnegans Wake since his late teens. “There’s a kind of visionary quality to it.”

Fialka leans into that visionary aspect, describing his group as “more a performance art piece than a book club”, and also referring to it as “a living organism”, a “hootenanny”, and a “choir”.

Woodside found the club’s early atmosphere “kind of chaotic”. The first impression of most readers is that Finnegans Wake is “gibberish”, Woodside said, and he recalls that “a lot of commentary on it was gibberish”, too.

Woodside dropped out of Fialka’s group for about two decades, but after he retired, he decided to go back. He had sampled other book groups, including a Proust reading group that had pivoted to reading Finnegans Wake, but it was hard to find anyone “who was really delivering a lot of intelligent commentary on the book”.

“Gerry’s group was just fun,” Woodside said. In the 20 years he had missed, he said, the group had advanced from chapter one to chapter 15.

Peter Quadrino, 38, joined Fialka’s group around 2008 or 2009. He would drive up three hours from San Diego, where he lived, to attend the meeting. “If you’re really interested in Finnegans Wake, it’s kind of hard to find people who will talk about it with you”…
READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE HERE: http://tinyurl.com/4zaymney
SEE ALSO: https://people.well.com/user/abs/Cyb/archive/mcluhan_joyce.html

One of Marshal McLuhan’s copies of Finnegans Wake showing his abundant marginalia, now in the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto

Filed under: Academic, Articles, Books, Computers, Education, Ideas, Influenced by McLuhan, Literature, Uncategorized   |  Closed
Tags: academic, articles, books, communication, culture, ideas, literature

Marshall McLuhan Fellow 2023 Jodesz Gavilan Speaking in Toronto on February 6

22Jan24

From Paolo Granata, Media Ethics Lab, University of St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto

Hello folks! Join me on Tuesday FEB 6, for a special talk with Marshall McLuhan Fellow 2023 Jodesz Gavilan, investigative journalist, researcher, and podcast host. Jodesz Gavilan has been an investigative reporter and researcher for the independent news outlet Rappler since 2013.

For her presentation in Canada, she has chosen the topic: “Building Communities: The evolving role of journalists in covering human rights stories in the Philippines” in which she discusses the journalist’s expanding role that goes beyond reporting to include working on how to create impactful solutions to social challenges. Her presentation would explain how journalism can be more than truth-telling but also as an advocacy for collaborative action.

This event is presented by the School of Journalism at the Toronto Metropolitan University and my Media Ethics Lab at the University of Toronto – University of St. Michael’s College of Toronto, in collaboration with the Embassy of Canada in the Philippines with support from the McLuhan Foundation.

Registration (free) is required: https://jgavilan.eventbrite.ca

See also Rappler’s Jodesz Gavilan named 2023 Marshall McLuhan Fellow for Excellence in Journalism in the Philippines
here
http://tinyurl.com/ykmt2ed8

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The Passing of Father John Pungente, SJ, Media Educator (1939 – 2023)

20Dec23

Father John Pungente, SJ

Fr. John Pungente died December 6, 2023 in René Goupil Residence, Pickering, Ontario. He was in his 84th year and a Jesuit for 66 years. He was born in Port Arthur, Ontario, but grew up in Brandon, Manitoba. He was the son of John Pungente and Mary Wikien. John entered the Jesuits in 1957 and was ordained in 1971. He was then missioned to St Paul’s High School, Winnipeg, as a teacher and film guide, all the while serving as Chair of the Manitoba Film Board from 1972 to 1976. He was appointed Principal of St. Paul’s High School in 1976, a post he held for seven years. In 1985 he moved to Toronto to become Director of the Jesuit Communication Project, a role he fulfilled for thirty-four years. While holding that position he co-authored Media Literacy: A Resource Guide (1989), Meet the Media (1990), the award winning teaching kit, Scanning Television (1996), More than Meets the Eye: Watching TV Watching Us (1999) and Finding God in the Dark: The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Go To The Movies (2004).

In 1997, John created and hosted the award-winning television show: Scanning the Movies, and produced the video: A Heart to Understand. He was also president of the Canadian Association of Media Education Organizations. In 2018 he moved to Lourdes Parish, Toronto, doing pastoral ministry and editing the online Jesuit blog, IgNation. In early 2022, in diminishing health, he moved to La Storta Jesuit Community and subsequently to René Goupil Residence in Pickering.

Visitation: Manresa Chapel, Pickering, Monday, December 18 from 7 to 9 p.m., with Vigil Prayers at 8 p.m. Funeral: Manresa Chapel, Tuesday, December 19, 2023 at 10 a.m.; followed by burial at 2 p.m. in the Jesuit Cemetery, Guelph. Family and friends may also join the mass via live webcasting at: https://pickartphoto.com/stream/
FrJohnPungente/

Donations to the Jesuit Advancement Office, 43 Queen’s Park Cres. E., Toronto, ON M5S 2C3, (416-962-4500) would be appreciated as your expression of sympathy.

Condolences: www.rosar-morrison.com

As published in Winnipeg Free Press on Dec. 16, 2023.

************
A Remembrance by Howard R. Engel –
Dear Jesuit Fathers and McLuhan friends:

I was most saddened to learn of the untimely falling asleep in the Lord of the late Fr. John J. Pungente in the Winnipeg Free Press Passages section from this past Saturday, Dec. 16/23.

In addition to his accomplishments mentioned in his aforementioned obituary, Fr. John and his Jesuit Communications Project was the joint recipient of the Marshall McLuhan Initiative-sponsored Medium and the Light Award for 2014. See: – https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2014/07/09/2014-medium-light-award-goes-to-father-john-pungente-sj-media-educator/

On a personal note, Fr. John was my high school principal for nearly my whole time I attended St. Paul’s High School in    Winnipeg, 1975-1979. I have fond memories of him from this
formative time.
As the Brazilian liberation theologian, Leonardo Boff, wrote in his Way of the Cross – Way of Justice, “Human beings are not born to die; they die to be resurrected.” (Orbis Books: Maryknoll, NY, 1980, p. 122)
May God bless John for the good things he has done, forgive his sins and grant him repose with the just. May Fr. John rest in peace and may God grant his memory to be eternal! May what is offered be holy, and may what is broken be healed. May Fr. John’s memory be a blessing.
Sincerely,
Howard R. Engel
Founding Director & C.E.O.
The Marshall McLuhan Initiative
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

************
See also: – “2014 Medium & Light Award Goes to Father John Pungente SJ, Media Educator,” In the McLuhan Galaxy, July 9, 2014: https://tinyurl.com/3rduk89u

Father John Pungente, S.J., with the Medium & Light Award presented to him by the Marshall McLuhan Initiative   (Photo courtesy of the Marshall McLuhan Initiative)

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The corrected version of New Explorations, Vol 3 No 2 (2023) is now available

06Nov23

Professor Robert Logan asked me to circulate his announcement that: –

The final and corrected  version of <i>New Explorations</i> Vol 3 No 2 (2023) is now available at: – https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/nexj/issue/view/2787.

For those not familiar with New Explorations journal, it is a revival of the journal Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, created in 1953 by Marshall McLuhan and Ted Carpenter. New Explorations reaffirms and continues the theoretical perspectives of Explorations, which so profoundly influenced the Toronto School of Communication and media studies worldwide. Just as the first Explorations probed the emergent media technologies of McLuhan’s “electric age” in the latter 20^th century; New Explorations continues that voyage of discovery into the digital age of our new millennium.

Bob Logan

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Rappler’s Jodesz Gavilan named 2023 Marshall McLuhan Fellow for Excellence in Journalism in the Philippines

19Oct23

Rappler’s Jodesz Gavilan, 2023 McLuhan Fellow

The Embassy of Canada in the Philippines presented the annual Marshall McLuhan Fellowship for Excellence in Journalism to Jodesz Gavilan, writer and researcher for Rappler.

Mr. Colin Townson, Head of Political and Public Affairs of the Embassy of Canada, named Ms. Gavilan as the new McLuhan Fellow at the 2023 Jaime V. Ongpin Journalism Seminar organized by the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR). In presenting the award, Mr. Townson cited Ms. Gavilan’s “commitment to investigative journalism to inform the public about decisions and policies that affect their lives, in support of the public interest.”

He also lauded Ms. Gavilan’s “tenacity” and “outstanding efforts to provide in depth reporting that to illuminate the challenges, issues and people behind at the heart of every story.”

As a McLuhan Fellow, Ms. Gavilan will undertake a speaking tour with stops across the Philippines and in Canada, engaging with media professionals, journalists, academia, civil society and government officials.

The McLuhan Fellowship Program is the flagship media advocacy project of the Embassy of Canada in the Philippines, in partnership with Sun Life of Canada and the CMFR. First launched in in 1997, the program has been promoting excellence in journalism in the Philippines for 26 years.

Congratulations, Jodesz!

Rappler (portmanteau of the words “rap” and “ripple”) is a Filipino online news website based in Pasig, Metro Manila, the Philippines. It was founded by 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa along with a group of fellow Filipino journalists as well as technopreneurs. It started as a Facebook page named MovePH in August 2011 and evolved into a website on January 1, 2012.

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Report on the 24th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention

12Oct23

Fordham University – Lincoln Center Campus, New York, NY
“Arts/Symbol/Context/Meanings”
June 22 – 25, 2023
By Esther G. Juce
Board Member-at-Large
Marshall McLuhan Initiative
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

June 22, 2023
– Welcome from sponsoring agencies: Media Ecology Association, Institute of General Semantics, and The Department of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham University
– Plenary: Vera Dika, New Jersey City University, “Intersections: The Pictures Generation from Hallwalls to the Kitchen.” Dr. Dika discussed the following: The power of image and metaphor in video, TV, and film
o Film as art
o Art about film
o Use of light and of the human body in these media
– Plenary: Video: “Man [sic] on a Mission: The Power of Art in the Digital Age.” This was a very moving presentation about Camp Liberty, an annual summer encounter for children in the core area of Jersey City, NJ. The hallmark of Camp Liberty is to use the arts in the lives of children to foster holistic communication in the electronic age. The Camp engages many branches of the arts, including:
o Grassroots theatre
o Children’s music and literature
o Participants’ own compositions
Camp participants have reaped many benefits including an increase in literacy, dignity, self-expression, self-esteem, and sense of community; and an appreciation of time and space, deeper thinking, oral culture, and the value of participation. In all of this, Camp Liberty cultivates lasting friendships.
– Breakout Session: “Media Ecology and Everyday Life.”
o Erik Gustafson, Andrew Longcore, Brian F. McFadden, presented different aspects, vagaries, and pitfalls of bodybuilding, competitive trading card games, and hot sauce, respectively.
o Connie Svabo, having donned her lab coat with candies in hand, demonstrated how context and setting, as well as how one comes to the setting, can affect how one receives the agent, in this case candies in a Petrie dish. She also said that understanding these principles can help one come to meaning in a new fashion, and can make “the everyday” become extraordinary.
– Breakout Session: “Historical Perspectives on Media Ecology.” Nick Pertler discussed various ideas of Neil Postman on Media Education:
o There are the four pillars of humanity: 1) Rational thought; 2) Democratic process; 3) Meaningful information; and 4) Moral sense.
o Not all information is meaningful.
o Pertler alluded to Postman’s work Amusing Ourselves to Death.
o He questioned “technopoly” and “scientism” as constructive lenses.
o Information does not equal understanding. Barry D. Liss mentioned Jeremy Rifkin, environmentalist and philosopher. Austin Hestdalen gave a presentation on modernism, postmodernism, and hypermodernism, where things are “more real than real”.
Breakout Session: “An Objet d’Art that Symbolizes the McLuhan Percept of Tetrad: Presenting ‘The Medium and the Light Award’ for 2023.” Howard R. Engel presented The Medium and the Light Award to longtime media ecologist Dr. Robert K. Logan, M.I.T. graduate, physicist and collaborator with Marshall McLuhan himself. Logan, who was in Romania at the time, graciously accepted the award through an acceptance speech pre-recorded on June 12 and embedded in the PowerPoint presentation. Attendees included Marshall McLuhan Initiative board members, as well as two professors and an award-winning graduate student.

June 23, 2023
– Plenary: Michael Schudson, Columbia University, “Where do Contemporary Cultural Values Come From?”
“Question: How does science progress? Answer: Funeral by  funeral”. “Students must find answers for themselves.” Schudson is a proponent of “passionate skepticism”.
– Plenary: Panel Presentation: Phil Rose, Corey Anton, Eva Berger, Susan Drucker, Michael Plugh, Lance Strate,
and Laura Trujillo Linan, “General Semantics Writ Large: An Enduring Connection.” The following ideas arose:
o Better communication in real life
o Orality and literacy
o Content and context
o Understanding “technopoly” and its dangers
o “The listener may not be ready to hear, but one can plant the seed.”
o “Nothing should be presupposed.”
o Opposition to nihilism
o “There is no such thing as the definition.”
o The nature of a “good” question vs. a “bad” question
o Peace & justice: Making the world a better place
o Sanity vs. insanity
o The city as medium
o “Language belongs to no one, but belongs to everyone.”
o The work of Alfred Korzybski, (1879-1950), developer of General Semantics
– Plenary: Kipp Bradford, Harvard University School of Engineering, “Matter Over Antimatter: A Theory of Humanity’s Survival Through Technological Asymmetry.” Dr. Bradford said:
o “Technology is important to make a better world.”
o “There are positives and negatives to any technology and one must make choices where the former is greater than the latter.”
o “Artificial Intelligence will not ‘take over the world’. It’s been around for a long time. The only changes have been the increase in sophistication, complexity, speed, and capacity for data.”
o “The world doesn’t care about people; people care about the world.”
– Breakout Session: “Mediating Monroe, Mailer, and McLuhan.”
o Michael Devine described the image of Marilyn Monroe through Andy Warhol via the shocking and stark fictionalized chronicle of the inner life of Marilyn Monroe in the Andrew Dominik 2022 film, Blonde.
o Salvatore J. Fallica painted a portrait of novelist/journalist Norman Mailer and his media image as an environmentalist and political speaker in protest.
o Jonathan R. Slater took us back in his time machine to Expo ’67 in Montreal against the backdrop of the rise of Trudeau and Levesque. Here excitement was in the air with the emergent electronic age, the glory days of technology and television, and the “new cultural elite”. McLuhan loomed large as the visionary of “The Global Village” at the zenith of his career.
– Breakout Session: “Recovering the Human Encounter in the Digital Age.”
o Chase Mitchell discussed personhood and humanness, and the transcendent God and the incarnation.
“Machines are not sacramental; only humans are.”
o Dennis D. Cali cautioned against the notion that the other is “dead to me”, and to be open to the mystery of the other. “True encounters are not digital, but rather are a special path with fellow walkers. They are the opening of the self to the other, the touch, and compassion.”
o Robert C. MacDougall alluded to the horizontality of The Muppet Movie in communication for the young.
o Erik Gustafson described the meaning and communication of tattoos as being part of the human body.
– Breakout Session: “Grasping Context and Meaning”
o Corey Anton delivered a paper entitled “Apprehending the Elusive: Communication, Language and Literacy”. Here he stated that context and thus meaning are elusive. “Our communication is phonetic; if we don’t know the significance behind it, it becomes meaningless chatter.” Anton mentioned George Steiner’s book After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. “We assign meaning to otherwise arbitrary sounds, as in any word is a sound that comes out of my mouth”. Preliterate language is transparent, literate opaque. Language requires a listener.
o Sara van den Berg responded by saying that in the observed world, the signifier must be distinguished from the signified. “There are other significant components of communication other than phonetics, such as body language and silence.”
o Michael Plugh introduced issues of orality & literacy; structural archetypes; that significance is existential; the history of humanity; and Drew Leder’s book, The Absent Body, which describes the role the body plays in the shaping of the experience of the world.
– Plenary: “A Conversation with T.C. McLuhan, Author & Filmmaker.” Lance Strate conducted a delightful interview
of Teri McLuhan. McLuhan shared never-before-revealed intimate stories and images of her life as the daughter of intellectual giant Marshall McLuhan and of her life as an author and filmmaker, and a public personality in her own right. The conversation included such memorable moments as:
o Accounts of her father’s idiosyncrasies and her mother’s forbearance
o Descriptions of her empathy for the Indigenous peoples and her works about them
o Tales of her encounters with movie celebrities in her travels as a filmmaker, including Donald Sutherland in Shadow Catcher, William Shatner in The Third Walker, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron; as well as with such famous public figures as the President of India
o McLuhan rightly quipped that her life “has been a blast”!

June 24, 2023
– Plenary: Panel Presentation: The Urban Communication Foundation, (Peter Haratonik, Susan Drucker, Gary Gumpert, Austin Hestdalen, Erik Garrett), “Media Ecology of Urban Games and Gaming.” Concepts discussed were gaming as problem-solving, interpretation, and creating paths and linkages.
– Plenary: Richard Sennett, New York University, “Ruling as Acting.” Dr. Sennett aired such concepts as: o The relationship between life and the arts
o Life as theatre
o “A quintessential example of actors in this theatre is politicians with their clichés, spell-binding performances, well-worn words, and captivating musical tempi and rubato.”
o Climate of denial
o Suspension of truth, obstruction of knowledge
o Not allowing the spectators to challenge powers within the system
o Impression-monitoring
o Expressionless masks
o “The audience, in this case the electorate, is seduced to submit.”
– Plenary: Douglas Rushkoff, Queens College, “’I will not be auto-tuned’: Art as Soul in the Digital Media Environment.” Dr. Rushkoff gave a most moving presentation, revealing the following:
o “Digital technology is a disembodiment”
o “Attraction of the abstraction” in consumer marketing
o Killing by isolation and separation
o Work for employment’s sake, not art or production; removal of the intrinsic value of work
o Scientific capitalization; technological solutions for everything; manipulative applications
o “Who is in charge?”
o Television as agitation propaganda
o Using old media with new content
o “Social media is being used to control us, and to ‘replace’ us. This is not sci-fi conspiracy-theorizing, but an observation of actual current behaviour .”
o “One can’t get people to do anything, but can manipulate them, e.g. Skinner’s Box.”
o “These are four interventions needed to save our humanness and humanity
▪ Democratization of power, e.g. social constructs that foster conciliarity;
▪ Trigger Agency, e.g. claiming responsibility, media literacy, independent thinking;
▪ “Re-socialize” the people, e.g. “Team Humanity”, cooperation and collaboration, encourage friendships, “block parties”; and
▪ Cultivate awe, e.g. going beyond the self, the power of the soul, the experience of wonder.”
o Achieving a physical and social balance
o “Don’t be afraid of the ‘R’ word, i.e. ‘Religion’, after the style of Neil Postman, where religion is not necessarily a belief system, but a faith-living”
o “Recognize the integral role of the soul as part of our humanness, that which goes beyond scientism and empiricism and acknowledges the limitations of our rationalism.”
– Breakout Session: “Media, Ethics, and Technology.”
o Laura Trujillo Linan reflected on such concepts as
▪ “Can machines like humans?”
▪ “Can machines think like humans?”
▪ “All data has a prehistory and a history.”
▪ “Machines have no reason, no learning, no reflection”
▪ “Truth is presented as a lie; We have a crisis of truth””
▪ “Are we aware of this crisis?”
o Joshua Clements commented that media ecology can give us the tools to make ethical statements.
o Peter K. Fallon concluded that even institutions of higher learning, ostensibly the bastions of critical thinking, can be manipulated to fabricate untruths.
– Breakout Session: “Media, Politics, and Multi-Media Projections.”
o Adeena Karasick gave a colourful and intense parody of the media through her sound poetry and PowerPoint presentation.
o Blair Miller spoke on the tensions of media: Marshall McLuhan, politics, and power in digital environments.
o Read Mercer Schuchardt gave a presentation in absentia on how to build the Millennium Falcon.
– Banquet: A telling, but pithy response made by avant-garde singer/songwriter Michelle Shocked after receiving her MEA award was, “I’ve gotten a Grammy…This is better!”

My Reflections on the Proceedings
– Probably the most predominate clearly-articulated theme is that people associated with the MEA wish “to make the world a better place”. This echoes the traditional Jewish concept of tequn olam, literally “repairing the world”.
– There also appears to be a desire for:
o Protection of the integrity of our humanness and humanity
o A search for universal Truth, but expressed in ways unique to each person
o A quest for meaning and understanding
o Community with integrity
o Engagement in the “here and now”; consecration of time and space
– Likewise, there seems to be a concomitant aversion to:
o Loss of our humanness
o Nihilism
o A relativism where a concept means everything, and therefore means nothing
o A dualism that disengages the material, practical world
– In general, the conference participants demonstrated a passion for communication with understanding.

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AI & the Future of Education by University of Toronto Professor Paolo Granata

07Sep23

Paolo Granata is the director of the Media Ethics Lab at the University of Toronto. What makes us human in an age of AI? Professor Granata believes that AI – a new medium, a new language, a new information environment – holds the potential to enhance human agency and to reimagine the future of education.

The Media Ethics Lab is a research hub at the University of Toronto that studies the ways that digital media practices and emerging technologies are marked by ethical issues and decisive political, societal and cultural questions: http://mediaethics.ca 00:00

Intro 00:48 From the Gutenberg Galaxy to the Turing Galaxy
03:48 AI is not a Tool, it’s an Environment
05:00 Content matters, but context more so
08:00 Algorithmic learning vs Heuristic Learning

“Human vs. AI: Who’s Teaching Whom?

As the new academic year is about to start at the University of Toronto, I’d like to share my take on AI and the Future (and present) of Education. Like water to a fish, AI is the medium in which we are immersed now. It’s impact is ecological, it involves the entire human-technology ecosystem. AI is not a tool, AI is creating a new human environment.
So, here’s the thing: it’s not just about ChatGPT doing homework for students. The real danger is that we created a system where students must become like ChatGPT to successfully complete a course. The fact that students may be tempted to use IA tools to breeze through their coursework is the concrete evidence of the limited demand for creativity. In many disciplines students are not required to use their creativity or imagination to pass a course, they have to just follow the recipe, executing the algorithm given to them. This is not nurturing intellectual growth: this is just manufacturing educational conformity.
It seems we have created a system where similarity is rewarded, and originality is often overlooked. Is this what we really want education to become?

I believe that Generative AI is showing us the failure of this kind of algorithmic learning, the failure of this standardized and homogenized learning model. ChatGPT is actually showing us that it’s time to question, to reconsider, to shift from algorithmic learning to *heuristic learning*, a model that celebrates the joy of discovery, that encourages self-learning, self-assessment, an exploratory approach that fosters not just reasoning, but also creativity, imagination, education as a wellspring of wellbeing.”

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The Medium Is Still the Message

25Aug23

In fact, this may be truer than ever.

KEY POINTS

• Marshall McLuhan’s idea that the medium is the message is apparent in the presidential candidates.
• How the candidates on the debate stage announced their candidacy says something about the image they project.
• DeSantis launches 2024 bid on Twitter Spaces, Ramaswamy on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man has probably been a reference in every presidential campaign and debate since it was published in 1964, but with every major advancement in media technology, it becomes even more relevant.

The idea that the message is not merely the content, but also the mechanism for delivering the content, is especially important in an era where there is a plethora of options for transmitting a message.

How Technology Shapes Politics

For example, Twitter launched in 2006, and by the time the 2008 election season was in swing, Twitter had about 2.5 million unique users, according to ComScore. That rose to over 20 million in the next year, but importantly even when it was just 2.5 million unique users, the platform was already a major influence in U.S. politics.

On Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2008, John McCain and Barack Obama took the debate stage at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. The next day, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter blogged about the event with graphs showing the Twitter activity at pivotal moments in the debate.

Quickly, candidates understood their messages were being carried not just in the debate medium, the televised event medium, but also the social media medium. This inflection point in many ways echoed the first-ever televised presidential debate in 1960. Richard Nixon was, by most accounts, well-spoken and well-prepared, but sweating and appeared haggard. In contrast, John F. Kennedy looked healthy and vivacious.

Seeing, not just hearing, the candidates made a difference. Politician Bob Dole recalled the impact of seeing the candidates to a PBS reporter.

I was listening to it on the radio coming into Lincoln, Kansas, and I thought Nixon was doing a great job. Then I saw the TV clips the next morning, and he … didn’t look well. Kennedy was young and articulate and … wiped him out.

What Nixon was saying was overshadowed by the way he looked and that was only made possible for millions to see because of television cameras.

The Power of Social Media

In much the same way the lesson of the television camera became a new force in politics, the power of social media influenced a new generation of politicians. Barack Obama, with over 100 million Twitter followers, was the first president to respond to questions via Twitter and has been called “the first Twitter president.”

Social media campaigns have become important tools for elections since 2009. Donald Trump joined Twitter in 2009 and had over 88 million followers when his account was banned. Like traditional news media, social media can also be a source for critique of the candidates.

While presidential candidates can’t completely control how and where their campaigns are covered, they can control how and where they announce their candidacies. This makes the medium they choose for this important message especially important in understanding how they want to project their image.

In this debate season, it’s interesting to look at the mediums each candidate chose to announce their presidency and how the grammar of those mediums best supports their messages.

The Importance of Image

The most obvious example may be Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who announced his run on Twitter Spaces (now X). Technical glitches aside, DeSantis chose a platform that is itself facing controversy. As an article in The Atlantic put it,

Ever since Elon Musk announced his intention to acquire Twitter, take the company private, and introduce a new era of free-speech absolutism, users have been threatening to leave the platform—a threat that has been likened to those made by liberals during the 2016 presidential election to move to Canada.

What was it about Twitter that made DeSantis want to align himself with the platform? There are many possibilities—perhaps he wanted Musk’s endorsement, maybe he was hoping to capture the influence Donald Trump had enjoyed on Twitter, or maybe he was sending a message about free speech, or maybe he was making a point of not being afraid to step into the fray—whatever it may be. One thing is certain, it was not a happenstance.

Several other candidates took a more traditional route, announcing their candidacies at events in their own states or states with electoral influence. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced at a Town Hall in New Hampshire; North Dakota Gov. and former Microsoft executive Doug Burgum did it during a speech in Fargo, North Dakota; former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson declared he was running during a speech in Bentonville, Arkansas; Mike Pence had his formal campaign kickoff in Ankeny, Iowa; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina made his candidacy public in a speech at Charleston Southern University, a private Baptist college and Scott’s alma mater (which also happens to be in his hometown of North Charleston).

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley took a different route and made a video announcement. Her message, “time for a new generation” was transmitted in a newish way: Joe Biden also announced via video message. An advantage to this method is the editorial control—you may not be able to manage the humidity in North Charleston (or the snowstorm of Amy Klobuchar’s 2020 announcement), but a pre-recorded video allows for many takes and optimal settings.

Another interesting announcement came from biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who broke the news on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Like DeSantis’ medium of choice, Ramaswamy chose a platform that may have been more influential than anything he said when he announced.

As the debate season gets underway, it will become clearer what each of these candidates stands for and how the mediums they have chosen reflect their messages.

As Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out these mediums are not just a transmission mechanism, they bring with them a culture—and tapping into that culture is part of the strategy.

About the Author

Rebecca Dolgin is a Ph.D. researcher at the New School for Social Research studying misunderstandings, identity, and group behavior. She is a former editor-in-chief of The Knot and has contributed to Marie Claire, Women’s Health, and Elle.
Source: https://tinyurl.com/4y4njtm9

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