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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