“McLuhan foresaw that electronic media gave humans the quality of a disembodied, angel-like spirit, which happens to us right now when we literally resettle to social media or video games and operate our digital selves.” Mike Hodgkinson published in Post… Read More ›
Marshall McLuhan
Negativity bias takes the lead when news is paid by readers, not advertisers
Bad news plus good crowd makes good engagement. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020). A teaser on the main page of the New York Times’ website on May 14, 2020 read: Almost 3 million U.S. workers… Read More ›
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. A… 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 media ecology scholars, 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 Culture and… Read More ›
New senses, electronically induced. How gadgets reshape the human sensorium
Moving further into the digital world, we will be able to induce not just familiar but completely new, never before known senses. For example, a banking chip implanted under the skin may, one day, create the sense of a full… Read More ›
Text? No longer
Some thoughts on possible obsolescence in the Media Studies Triangle, Ontario Media Literacy Program “In 1988, Ontario became the first educational jurisdiction in the world to mandate media literacy as part of the English curriculum”, reports the “Media Education: Make… Read More ›
Trees die twice: the beautiful end of the book era
A library in Picton organized the DiscARTed Art show It was a cozy evening event organized by a local library in a small town. Anyone who wished to participate had been encouraged to pick up discarded books from one of… Read More ›