New Explorations

Origins

The New Explorations Project began as a series of seminars run by Adam Pugen and Steve Hicks at the University of Toronto’s McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology in 2015. After continuing this effort online as a private Facebook group for a number of years, Adam and Steve approached Toronto-based media scholar Robert K. Logan about extending The New Explorations Project into a periodical publication. Together, they launched the peer-reviewed New Explorations Journal along with its associated weblog.

New Explorations Journal

The New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication journal project is inspired by the original journal Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication. The first eight issues of Explorations were published between 1953 and 1957 at the University of Toronto and edited by Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan. A ninth issue was published in 1959 and was edited by Edmund Carpenter alone. Marshall McLuhan then edited issues 10 to 32 between 1964 and 1972 that appeared as inserts in the alumni magazines of the University of Toronto, with issues number 10 through19 appearing in the Varsity Graduate magazine and issues 20 through 32 appearing in the University of Toronto Graduate magazine.          

We hope to recapture the spirit of the original Explorations journal that had such an important influence in the development of the Toronto School of Communication.

Our approach to these studies is that of media ecology as developed by Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Ted Carpenter, Walter Ong, Neil Postman and a host of other media ecologists and communication theorists, but need not be limited to that. While we honour the past, we need not dwell there. We invite contributors to this journal to break new ground, to probe and wrestle with pressing concerns, to generate, amplify and provoke. We will study the impact of current media and make use of multimedia technologies to organize the activities of our open access online journal and project, as described below.

 New Explorations, like the original Explorations, is designed:

…not as a permanent reference journal that embalms truth for posterity, but as a publication that explores and searches and questions. We envision a series that will cut across the humanities and social sciences by treating them as a continuum. We believe anthropology and communications are approaches, not bodies of data, and that within each of the four winds of the humanities, the physical, the biological and the social sciences intermingle to form a ‘science of man’

Ted Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan. 1953. Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication 1, iii

The objectives of our project are the same as those of the original Explorations. However, while the original Explorations wrestled with the challenges of electric media, primarily television and mainframe computers, our challenge will be to take on emerging digital media environments and make sense of them, to explore the new opportunities that they present while preserving all that was of value in the pre-digital age.

In this spirit, we have organized our project to take advantage of the services of the digital environment. The New Explorations project consists of two online components. The first component is the journal itself: the online open access journal New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication (NExJ) hosted by the University of Toronto Libraries’ Journal Production Services. The journal NExJ publishes peer reviewed open access academic articles and reviews of books associated with studies in culture and communication. The second component is the weblog.

The New Explorations Blog

Our weblog features the following items:

1. Research and probes on the psychic and cultural effects of contemporary media environments.
2. Background information and studies on the original Explorations journal and the scholarship behind it.
3. Artwork related to the study of culture and communication, including videos, graphics, photographs, music, podcasts, poetry and short stories.
4. A discussion forum for readers and authors/artists.
5. Digital preprints so that once an article submitted to the NExJ Journal has successfully passed peer review and has been properly copy-edited it can be made immediately available. Once the next issue of the NExJ Journal is released this digital preprint will appear with the other articles of that issue. The purpose of this mechanism is to provide our authors with the immediate circulation of their articles without the long delays they often experience between the acceptance of their paper and its publication.
6. Links to and/or information about other resources in the field of media ecology, culture and communications that might be of interest to our readership such as upcoming events, symposia and conferences.

For inquiries about our blog and/or about submitting material, please contact the Blog Editors Adam Pugen and Steve Hicks at newexplorationsblog@gmail.com.