Posts under ‘media studies’

In the introduction to Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig makes this caveat about the scope and style of his project:
My method is not the usual method of an academic. I don’t want to plunge you into a complex argument, buttressed with references to obscure French theorists— however natural that is for the weird sort we academics [...]

I’d like to see an extension of the Poynter Timeline documenting the parallel development of computer-based information accessibility. Here are several of my milestones:
1976: The first time I heard about CCTV reading systems for visually impaired people. It wasn’t a doctor, an educator, or a rehab counselor who told me about it, but a [...]

[Editor's Note: Harold A. Innis presented “The Bias of Communication” as a talk at the University of Michigan on April 18, 1949. The essay was gathered in a 1951 collection of his works also titled The Bias of Communication, published by the University of Toronto Press. The copyright is held by the University of Toronto, [...]

While reading W. Terrence Gordon’s biography of Marshall McLuhan, I came across a McLuhan pronouncement so absurd that I need to figure out how to fit it into my MiT6 presentation:
In North America … TV has not been the friend of literacy except to encourage depth involvement in language as a complex structure. In other [...]

The Media in Transition 6 conference (MiT6) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is scheduled for April 24-26, 2009. The conference theme is “Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission.” The deadline for submitting proposals is January 9, 2009.
Ms. Modigliani and I went to MiT5 in 2007, and we found it to be one of [...]