Fake news is an overhyped issue. The greatest harm caused by media is polarization, and the biggest issue is that polarization has become systemically embedded into both social media and the mass media. Polarization is not merely a side effect but has morphed into a condition of their business. The recent surge in polarization originated
SalomĂ©: Woman of Valor is a collaborative multimedia artworkâa multivalent and multisensory experienceâcrafted by poet and professor Adeena Karasick and composer and musician Frank London which de- and re-constructs the popular mythos of SalomĂ© through a self-referential nexus of the printed word, visual art, and music. As Karasick notes in her introduction to the 2017 University
Media guru Marshall McLuhan met LSD evangelist Timothy Leary for the first time in 1966 at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. Leary was in town to testify at the U.S. Senate Hearings on psychedelic drugs. The two hit it off and seemed to understand each other in that special way fellow travelers in life do.
Before computer hacking, the analogue, mechanical telephone system was the play-thing of “phone phreaks” like Steve Wozniak. But few are aware of the unbelievable life of this subversive past-time’s founderâJoybubblesâwho started it all in the 50s before he turned eight. Documentary Film Director Rachael Morrison joins the New Explorations Podcast to retrieve one of the
Understanding Media Intensive is a 12-part look at media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s major 1964 work “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,” taught by Andrew McLuhan, Director of The McLuhan Institute. In an age where our media environment conditions and structures our reality in increasingly potent ways, Understanding Media provides important foundational knowledge on how our cultural traumas and
A book is a beginning. In the last decade, when some might have said the book was dead, books have really come alive for me. Some may be inclined to say that books are not living thingsâbut I know differently: books, libraries, are not inert, and there is more than meets the eye. There they sit,
Is there any hope our private selves aren’t too far gone? Does total surveillance and data analytics pull our agency and very being inside-out? Are we becoming, as McLuhan said of Narcissus over fifty years ago, “the servomechanism of own extended or repeated image?” Professor Derrick de Kerckhove, 25-year director of the McLuhan Center
Phenomenology is treated ambiguously in McLuhanâs posthumous Laws of Media, which was edited and co-authored by his son, Eric. On the one hand, it is seen as an abstract attempt1 to achieve what could not, in McLuhanâs view, be achieved in this way: the root problem of phenomenology that it is an all-out attempt by dialectic to