Bad news plus good crowd makes good engagement. A teaser on the main page of the New York Times’ website on May 14, 2020 read: Almost 3 million U.S. workers filed for unemployment last week. Although the weekly tally has… Read More ›
Marshall McLuhan
Polarization studies are media studies
Fake news is not the principal problem in the new media environment. The impact of fake news is already mitigated by the users’ growing immunity and also by the growing noise that diminishes the potency of fake news’ impact. The… Read More ›
Postjournalism: Discourse concentration
The polarization of stances requires the commonality of topics, in which the stances have to be polarized. In Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the deadly clash within the great Lilliput nation was caused by irreconcilable discord regarding which end of an… Read More ›
Interjections and emojis: the digital reversal of literacy back to the origin of language
Electronic media, as McLuhan noted, retribalized society and therefore diminished the significance and influence of literacy. Retribalization of culture by the switch from literacy media to digital media reverses social communication not just back to orality, but even to the… Read More ›
The post-truth world: how social media destroy the absolutism of the “objective” truth
Monotheistic religion, scientific ethic, and writing alienated truth from personal experience. Social media return truth from priests to people. Nobody likes it. In 2016, Oxford Dictionary declared ‘post-truth’ to be the Word of the Year. The dictionary explains the adjective… Read More ›
Transcending Human Sensorium
People still act in virtual reality in a mostly natural way, as “physical beings”, which is obviously predefined by their (our) previous experience. Moreover, the content of the virtual reality is still the physical reality. This reflects McLuhanian ideas of… Read More ›
Altering Human Sensorium
Artificial flavours, augmented senses, immersive media, augmented reality, virtual reality By shaping the media environment, media are able to tune the human sensorium according to their “bias”. Equipped with ideasthesia/synesthesia, the sensorium follows the environment. In its turn, thanks to… Read More ›
Celebrating re-launch of McLuhan’s Coach House activity in the 21 Century
For those deep in media study, the Coach House has always been a place of force. On October 20th, 2015, the McLuhans and Mcluhanists gathered in the Coach House, at the University of Toronto, to revitalize the McLuhan Centre for… Read More ›
