With the plane the cities began to have the same slender relation to human needs that museums do. They became corridors of showcases echoing the departing forms of industrial assembly lines. – Understanding Media, 1964 Centralism depends on margins that are accessible by road and wheel. Maritime power does not assume this center-margin structure, and
When Marshall McLuhan mentions Henri Bergson at all, it is in a dismissive tone. The reasons why are simple enough. McLuhan was a Thomist inspired by Jacques Maritain, a fellow convert to Catholicism and student of Bergson at The Sorbonne. Bergson’s philosophy of Creative Evolution(1907 in French)āof a rising spirit of change and time coursing
Cameron McEwen is a digital publisher who has been regularly posting at McLuhan’s New Sciences since 2013. This post was originally written in April of 2020. In July 1978, as part of Louis Forsdaleās course on communication at Columbia1, McLuhan and Forsdale conducted a dialogue of sorts (with McLuhan doing nearly all the talking, of
The first āArtificial Intelligenceā has emerged in the technological world, made up of real people: the Viral Editor of the Internet. It is currently building a new social reality, creating an alternative form of guerrilla journalism and begetting a new social contract. This collective being is in full opposition to the crowd and is an enemy
I met Marshall McLuhan when he replaced me as a guest lecturer at Fordham University in September of 1967. Thatās the story Iāve been telling all these years, and itās mostly true. John Culkin, S.J., who had an uncanny talent for keeping his ear to the ground, learned in the spring of 1967 that I
In a May 1946 letter to Felix Giovanelli, McLuhan points out the poetry in the placement of an experimental atomic reactor pile mentioned in a scientific report. That it should be situated symbolically in a football stadium is too perfect. American sport, the artistic imitation of American business. Our great emotional educator and indicator. You
At the end of the second year of my doctoral program, the first and second year PhD students were asked to create a poster communicating their doctoral research. Since my own research centred largely on aesthetics, form, and perception as framed by the media scholarship of Marshall McLuhan, the natural choice for me was to
It was a drizzly day in New York in the Spring of 1977, if memory serves. I was more than halfway through with my PhD in the Media Ecology Program at New York University, and Neil Postman was my doctorial dissertation advisor. I went up to see him in his office off Washington Square Park.
In the past few months, I’ve done a large number of podcasts and videos about COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and the media: A – I had conversations with Neil Andersen and Carol Arcus about all of those topics on theirĀ MediacyĀ podcast.Ā You can find links to them all over, but here are the Apple Podcasts link