Category Archives: media studies

Marshall McLuhan’s Legacy – Wikipedia


According to Wikipedia: “After the publication of Understanding Media, McLuhan received an astonishing amount of publicity, making him perhaps the most publicized English teacher in the twentieth century and arguably the most controversial. This publicity had much to do with the work of two California advertising executives, Gerald Feigen and Howard Gossage, who used personal profits to fund their practice of “genius scouting.” Much enamoured with McLuhan’s work, Feigen and Gossage arranged for McLuhan to meet with editors of several major New York magazines in May 1965 at the Lombardy Hotel in New York. Philip Marchand reports that, as a direct consequence of these meetings, McLuhan was offered the use of an office in the headquarters of both Time and Newsweek, any time he needed it.” Continue reading

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The French Theorist Meme


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 … Continue reading

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Who Will Write The History of Accessible Technology?


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 … Continue reading

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Accessible Innis 2.0: The Bias of Communication


[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 … Continue reading

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Café Mouffe Encore: Marshall McLuhan


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 … Continue reading

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