Call for essays
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- Category: Events
- Created on Thursday, 09 February 2012 15:28
- Written by Bob Logan
- Hits: 77
The collection of essays Media and Formal Cause edited by Eric McLuhan and published by NeoPoiesis Press is a book of great importance to the field of Media Ecology and McLuhan Studies. If you have not yet read it I urge you to do so. Corey Anton and I have both written papers discussing McLuhan's notion of formal cause which we plan to publish in a collection of essays reacting to and commenting on Media and Formal Cause. The abstracts of these papers are reproduced below. Any one wanting to read the complete papers should email Corey or me off line and we will email the papers to you. Corey and I will be joined by Lance Strate as editors of this collection. The purpose of this communication is to invite you to contribute to this collection by writing an essay sharing your thoughts of McLuhan's use of formal cause.
From Freud’s unconscious to digital unconscious
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- Category: Events
- Created on Thursday, 09 February 2012 14:59
- Written by Cristina Miranda de Almeida
- Hits: 88
For the International McLuhan Galaxy Conference in Barcelona the Scientific Committee prepared a session titled Social Media, Networks and Life. This session was inspired by three aphorisms by McLuhan: (1)“The user is the content”; (2) “The more they know about you the less you exist”; (3) “This has become the main business of mankind, just watching the other guy (and) invading privacy. Everybody has become porous”.
We can add a fourth aphorism to this list – (4) “the more they know about you the less you exist”- and make a direct connection of this session in the conference to the four seminars on the Digital Unconscious that Derrick de Kerckhove will be giving in the Internet Interdiscipinary Institute, University Oberta de Catalunya in 2012 (see dates and hours below).
McLuhan’s critical thought
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- Category: Editorials
- Created on Monday, 30 January 2012 22:06
- Written by E. Patti, M. Ciastellardi
- Hits: 236
Re-cognizing McLuhan’s critical thought. In 2011 over 200 events worldwide have revitalized vibrant multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary debate around McLuhan’s thought, best known for his popular concepts such as ‘the global village’ and ‘the medium is the message’. Drawing on his most famous works, The Mechanical Bride (1951), The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), we can readily understand why in the last sixty years his name has mainly been associated to media theory. In the last two decades, especially, the arrival of the Internet, the explosion of new interactive media, the convergence between old and new media and the development of innovative communication practices have indeed confirmed that Marshall McLuhan’s ideas and the approach of the School of Toronto are still as relevant and transformative today as they were fifty years ago when he foresaw how technology would transform humanity. We cannot but acknowledge the impact of media technology on culture and welcome McLuhan’s thought in every disciplinary field, since there is no subject area, as a socially intended form of knowledge, which is excluded from a technological environment.
From the letter to electronic lettrism.
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- Category: Interviews
- Created on Saturday, 28 January 2012 10:50
- Written by Emanuela Patti
- Hits: 65
From the letter to electronic lettrism.The reincarnation of the word and the implosion of the Muses. Interview to Derrick de Kerckhove by Emanuela Patti. Wicklow, July 23rd, 2010
EP: After its original form of orality, for many centuries now literature has mainly developed as a creative form of expression of the Gutenberg Galaxy In the technological shift from writing to digital language, from text to hypertext though, the word seems to undergo a new transformation In some of your lectures, you used the concept of ‘electronic lettrism’ to describe this evolution Could you explain what you mean by that?
DdeK: In 1947 Isidore Isou, a Parisian artist, published the manifest of lettrism. In fact, lettrism further develops what Arthur Rimbaud had started with Voyelles, meant to give colour to the letter, and rethink the letter as something sensorial. This offers an artistic dimension to the problem; it is a form of calligraphy, which originates, in my opinion, from the impact of the new technologies of reproduction and diffusion of publicity images on erstwhile bare Paris walls, but it’s also a return of the senses into writing: Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, for example, turn the lines of writing into images.
Thoughts after McLuhan
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- Category: McLuhan, the Message and the Global Village
- Created on Saturday, 28 January 2012 09:18
- Written by Eric McLuhan
- Hits: 245
This year, 2011, marks the centenary of Marshall McLuhan’s birth in Edmonton, Alberta, on July 21. The year has seen a great number of lectures and conferences devoted to discussing and assessing his work, which still, more than thirty years after his death, has the power to upset conventional minds and challenge conventional explanations of what new technologies and their media do to the users and their cultures. A centenary also affords, among other things, a timely occasion for taking stock of his contributions to our understanding of media and society. After all, McLuhan established, virtually single-handed, the fields of media study and of media ecology.
