Probing McLuhan: Understanding Media Culture

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TOPIA presents panel at Probe 2004: The McLuhan International Festival of the Future

 

TORONTO, October 14, 2004 -- As an academic partner of Probe 2004: the McLuhan International Festival of the Future, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies presents a public panel on current work in McLuhan scholarship. Four leading scholars in contemporary media and cultural studies will present commentaries and invite open discussion on McLuhan’s contribution to understanding media.

 

Janine Marchessault, Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization at York University, will consider the meanings of the ephemeral and the sacred in light of commercial media, recent global art interventions and synchronized political action in the anti-globalization and peace movements in ‘McLuhan and the Death of Art’.

 

Bob Hanke, assistant professor of Communication Studies in York University’s Division of Social Science, will address how McLuhan’s critique of media probed the shift from the experience of time to the experience of speed in ‘McLuhan and Speed in the Age of Digital Reproduction.’

 

Robert Babe, Jean Monty/CBC Chair in Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, presents ‘Innis and McLuhan: Environmentalists’, addressing the media theorists’ contributions to a ‘Culture of Ecology,’ which he defines as “modes of analysis, symbolizing and acting that are broadly consistent with ecological principles.” 

 

Gary Genosko, Canada Research Chair in Technoculture at Lakehead University, will speak to McLuhan’s relevance at the end of the cathode ray tube’s dominance of televisual hardware in ‘Is TV Still Sticky in the Age of a Digital McLuhan?’

 

The panel will be held Sunday, October 17th, 1:00-4:00pm, The Underground, Drake Hotel, 1150 Queen St. W.   Admission is free.  For more information about the Festival, visit http://www.mcluhanfestival.com/; for more information about TOPIA, visit www.yorku.ca/topia

 

 

 

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