Search Results (22)

This article investigates the period of the origin of Christianity, namely that of the first century, the phase in which the emerging “Christianity” was being formed. It is a phase that has been much studied from many angles. The angle adopted in this article approaches the topic from a mediological framework. It relates to the Toronto School and the theses of Marshall McLuhan, for whom a medium is not only a communication channel but constructs the message and determines a way of reasoning. In this sense, the question arises as to how much, in the period of the birth of the new religion, the “media”, here understood as “environments”, had an influence: orality, writing, images, and spectacular performances cooperated in the construction of a multimedia religion that also drew from this richness a specific strength with which to impose itself over time. In particular, the following will be examined: the oral message of the “Rabbi” of Nazareth; the invention of the epistles of Paul of Tarsus; the conception of the Gospels as a written narration of the salvific event, capable of transforming the figure of Jesus into Christ; and the Apocalypse of John as the Christianization of a traditional genre. Full article

John Henry Newman defined the university as “a place of teaching universal knowledge”, which suggests that it is also an environment for the teaching and creation of knowledge, and therefore a medium for the teaching and creation of knowledge. Based on the field of media ecology, defined by Neil Postman as “the study of media as environments”, and following Marshall McLuhan’s famous maxim that, “the medium is the message”, we can understand knowledge to be the product of a particular type of medium or environment. Taking inspiration from the poetic questions posed by T.S. Eliot, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”, this essay takes issue with the view expressed among internet boosters that information is the basis of knowledge, and knowledge is the basis of wisdom. Instead, an alternative understanding presented in which information as a contemporary phenomenon is a product of the electronic media environment, knowledge is a product of the literacy associated with the chirographic and typographic media environments, and wisdom is a product of the oral media environment. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a surge in online studio education, which has presented a significant challenge to traditional design studio teaching methods that rely on face-to-face interactions between instructors and students. It is contended that online studio education enhances the accessibility of design studio pedagogy, making it possible for students to learn from anywhere in the world. However, it also challenges the development of tactile skills, which are crucial in design education. Additionally, online studio education can render certain aspects of traditional design studio pedagogy obsolete, while bringing back elements of design history and theory that may have been overlooked in traditional studio teaching. It can also be argued that online studio education has the potential to reverse the traditional power dynamics between instructors and students, resulting in more democratic and collaborative forms of learning that can empower students. As the literature on the effects of online studio education is growing, there is a need to understand how the shift from the material space and its affordances to an online environment affects the core components of an architectural design studio. To understand the effects of this new medium, this research employed Marshall McLuhan’s tetradic approach, a hermeneutic tool to perform a critical interpretation of any medium by examining four simultaneous effects: how it enhances a human sense, what it makes obsolete, what forgotten aspect it retrieves, and how it flips into its opposite at its extremes. A literature review was conducted to analyze the effects of online studios from a tetradic framework and identify the major discussions of the impact of online studio education. The methodology involves a two-part literature review. This study specifically focused on peer-reviewed, empirical research published after 2020, and the authors used search terms related to online architectural studios during the pandemic. The process identified 176 records of peer-reviewed empirical studies for further analysis and 20 papers were read and included in the review, defining repeating topics/themes and organized under four categories pertaining to the founding archetypes of an architectural design studio: (a) setting and communication, (b) actors, (c) outputs, and (d) dynamics. This process was followed by organizing the findings and interpreting them within the tetradic framework to develop a comprehensive understanding of the consequences of the online design studio. Overall, this research aims to provide a detailed and nuanced analysis of the impact of online studio education on design studio pedagogy, conceptualizing McLuhan’s tetrad as a basis for the analysis, and therefore aiming to enrich our understanding of the post-COVID-19 era of learning architecture by examining the dramatic change in the medium and its effects. Full article

Electronic communication of the Christian message—online preaching—raises distinct theological challenges. Notwithstanding the undeniable convenience and unlimited geographical reach of “virtual church”, electronic media have the potential to separate preacher from congregants, congregants from one another, and—potentially of greatest concern—the church from God, even while appearing to accomplish the opposite. Communication theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) argues provocatively that virtual representation is at the cost of authentic human identity (in which case it is inimical to community), while French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) warns of substituting representation for reality, especially in matters of theology and the identity of God. The paradigm of Jesus’ Incarnation, by contrast, mandates un-mediated divine-human and human-to-human communication, requiring engagement between persons themselves rather than their avatars or provisional simulacra. With respect to electronically mediated communication itself, acknowledging divine initiative in the formation of identity (as a feature of soteriology) and of understanding (under the category of revelation) countermands the more dehumanizing and anti-theological influences that McLuhan and Baudrillard both identify, encouraging direct engagement with God in the person of the Holy Spirit rather than resorting to technological mediation. Full article

In some forms of Zen Buddhism, the aspiring student is given a problem to solve, whether it be a paradoxical koan, a probing question about the self, or some personal dilemma to which there appears to be no answer. This struggle of the student towards enlightenment is described as the creation in the student of a great mass or ball of doubt, called a daigidan. The more and more the student struggles with this problem, the more he or she becomes frustrated, lost, blocked, enmeshed and burdened down by this growing ball of doubt. Every examination of the problem reveals new difficulties; confusion ensnarls the world; the strings and strands of doubt multiply until the point is reached where everything in the universe seems to be entangled and paralyzed—all tied up in knots. Moreover, it is said that the greater the ball of doubt grows, the greater the moment of awakening when at last it finally comes. Into our hands, in our time, has been given a Great Ball of Doubt, perhaps the greatest ball of doubt there could possibly be: the Earth. It is an immense koan, the solution for which we are now, like Zen students, intensely and personally responsible: that is, our lives and futures depend on our being able to unravel the knots of its mysterious burden. The solving of such a mystery is internal to it (unlike a problem that stands outside of us), and the realization that the planet has finite boundaries has caused an “implosion of sensibility”—a vast cultural struggle between those who have internalized this finiteness, and those who still persist in believing in an infinite planet, with infinite resources, occupied by humans with infinite desires. Instead, in order to solve this immense all-engulfing koan, we are being driven into new (and sometimes very old) forms of planetary embeddedness and immanence, and away from flights to some kind of irresponsible imaginary ranscendence. Full article

From the perspective of media ecology, this paper explores the question of responsibility for the effects that media have on society. To explain these media effects, two approaches are singled out. (1) The instrumental approach assumes that a medium works as a tool used by a user for a purpose. (2) The environmental approach focuses on the capacity of a medium to become an environmental force that reshapes both the habitat and the inhabitants. The instrumental approach to media, when taken too broadly and without an understanding of its limits, leads to conspiracy theories and inadequate social and political assessments. The more advanced and sophisticated environmental approach allows for an adequate understanding of media evolution and its effects but does not comply with the traditional legal notions of guilt and responsibility for actions, as there is no jurisdictional human or institutional agency when environmental forces are in play. After charting the distinction between the instrumental and environmental views of media, the paper focused on how the instrumental effects of media turn into environmental effects. The purpose of the paper is to develop and offer a media ecological apparatus for possible further juridical discussions regarding the regulation of the networking society. Full article

There has been a paradigm shift in global communications since the death many years ago of prominent Canadians Marshall McLuhan and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The correspondence between the two friends, from 1968 to 1980, presciently touched on our contemporary wired global village and the challenges it presents to personal privacy and to freedom of expression. I examine the relationship between the two men, as laid out in their letters and, to a lesser extent, in secondary sources, highlighting matters of privacy and media. Privacy hovers over the correspondence, even when it is not the stated topic. McLuhan, who is credited with the term “global village”, discussed with Trudeau the effect of new media on people’s notions of tribe and identity and privacy. Proving a direct influence from one man to the other, in either direction, is not possible, but there is much to play with. The gap is, as McLuhan often said, “where the action is”. Full article

This article presents the iProbe concept developed by the Canadian photographer Rita Leistner. This analytical tool is one of the ways to present the image of modern warfare that emerges from messages in social media and photographs taken using smartphones. Utilized to understand the approach are photographs Leistner took at the American military base in Musa Qala (Helmand province, Afghanistan) during the implementation of the “Basetrack” media project in 2011. The theoretical basis for this study is Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, which was used by the photographer to interpret her works from Afghanistan. Leistner is the first to apply the various concepts shaped by McLuhan in the second half of 20th century, such as “probe”, “extension of man”, and the “figure/ground” dichotomy, to analyze war photography. Her blog and book entitled Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan shows the potential of using McLuhan’s concepts to interpret the image of modern warfare presented in the contemporary media. The application of McLuhan’s theory to this type of photographic analysis provides the opportunity to focus on the technological dimension of modern war and to look at warfare from a technical perspective such as what devices and communication solutions are used to solve armed conflicts as efficiently and bloodlessly as possible. Therefore, this article briefly presents twelve iProbes that Leistner created based on her experiences from working in Afghanistan concerning photography, military equipment, interpersonal relations, and various types of communication. Full article

Seven weeks before the release of his novel, Slade House (2015), David Mitchell began tweeting as a character, “Bombadil”, from the forthcoming text. The tweets appeared on an account, @I_Bombadil (2015), set up by Mitchell, with the platform affording the author the opportunity to extend the character’s narrative arc beyond the pages of the print-published novel and into Twitter’s digital environs. For Mitchell, the boundaries separating literary works are never absolute and the process of repeatedly returning to and referencing prior works, methodically expanding and stretching his corpus by thematically and structurally folding each new work into an extant literary universe, is the central characteristic of his literary practice. What was notable in the case of @I_Bombadil and Slade House, however, was that the connections across and between the works were also connections across and between distinct media environments. This article examines the ways in which the temporal-spatial entanglements between @I_Bombadil and Slade House, characteristic of Mitchell’s retrospective and recursive literary practice, were intensified and complicated as they were further tangled up with the temporal–spatial dynamics of digital and print media respectively. By utilising Marshall McLuhan’s media studies, and particularly his concept of the “resonant interval”—the borderline between “acoustic” and “visual” space produced in the dialogue between electronic (digital) and print media—as a means of articulating the dialogic double-space in between @I_Bombadil and Slade House, this article addresses the works as a symbiotic product of both literary technique and materialist media operability, adopting a nuanced, media-oriented perspective that fully engages with the temporal affordances of the Twitter platform as an inextricable aspect of the fundamentally temporal-spatial dynamics of Mitchell’s “resonant” literary practice. Full article

This paper explores the rise and fall of Cyberpunk influences in California’s Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay area circa 1988–93, in prevalent technologies, industry, by artists and in enthusiastic magazines thriving there. Attentive to the Cyberpunk novelists, an animating spirituality of the time also looks to Timothy Leary and Marshall McLuhan. Full article

We examine the spiral structure of the thinking and the work of Marshall McLuhan, which we believe will provide a new way of viewing McLuhan’s work. In particular, we believe that the way he reversed figure and ground, reversed content and medium, reversed cause and effect, and the relationship he established between the content of a new medium and the older media it obsolesced all contain a spiral structure going back and forth in time. Finally, the time structure of his Laws of Media in which a new medium obsolesced an older medium, while retrieving an even older medium and then when pushed far enough flipped into a still newer medium has the feeling of a spiral. We will also examine the spiral structure of the thinking and work of those thinkers and artists that most influenced McLuhan such as Vico, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Joyce, TS Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticism movement. Full article

The purpose of this synthesis is to deconstruct the medium of Marshall McLuhan’s prose as an anti-environment for the medium of traditional academic writing. By placing McLuhan’s own theory in dialogue with the founding principles of linguistic anthropology, I will argue that McLuhan’s authorial tactics—a subject of his long-term repudiation by the academic community on the whole—adhered to the tenets of the Electric Age, and were thus inherently incomprehensible to those who negotiated academic prose as a medium locked within the media environment of the Print Age. Full article

The alphabet effect that showed that codified law, alphabetic writing, monotheism, abstract science and deductive logic are interlinked, first proposed by McLuhan and Logan (1977), is revisited. Marshall and Eric McLuhan’s (1988) insight that alphabetic writing led to the separation of figure and ground and their interplay, as well as the emergence of visual space, are reviewed and shown to be two additional effects of the alphabet. We then identify more additional new components of the alphabet effect by demonstrating that alphabetic writing also gave rise to (1) Duality, and (2) reductionism or the linear sequential relationship of causes followed by effects. We then review McLuhan’s (1962) claim that electrically configured information reversed the dominance of visual space over acoustic space and led to the reversals of (1) cause and effect, and (2) figure and ground. We then demonstrate that General System Theory first formulated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968), which also includes chaos theory, complexity theory and emergence (aka emergent dynamics) and Jakob von Uexküll’s (1926) notion of umwelt also entail the reversal of many aspects of the alphabet effect such as the reversals of (1) cause and effect, and (2) figure and ground. Full article

The Greek notion of archetype was adopted and popularized in the context of the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung. Marshall McLuhan used the concept archetype as a formal perspective rather than the content of an alleged “collective unconscious”. In his book From Cliché to Archetype, the idea of archetype is presented as the ground where individual action is the figure. This article, departing from the notion of archetype, explores some convergences between the thought of Carl Jung and Marshall McLuhan and some of its developments for Media Ecology studies. Full article