Video: Marshall Arts - McLuhan and media scholars

The Institute of General Semantics has recently posted videos of presentations given at the 2011 General Semantics Symposium. Included is my presentation: "Marshall Arts: Retrieving McLuhan for Communication Scholars". This was my first conference presentation, and the paper eventually became my first academic publication. The focus of my work has shifted considerably in the time since, but this was a personal milestone and I enjoyed being able to revisit it four years on. You can watch the talk, along with others from the symposium, through the official IGS Youtube channel, and via the embed below:

End of 2012 mega blow-out post

• "General Semantics and media theory": video of a 20-minute presentation by Thom Gencarelli from this year's IGS symposium.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sMo4cTZTgQ&w=560&h=315]

• "Game or be gamed: Douglas Rushkoff on prototyping democracy through play"

"Those levels of interactivity, for me, recapitulated the levels of participation that we as a society have had since the invention of media," Rushkoff said, referring to similar shifts that occurred when humans first transitioned from written language to the age of movable type.

• Find the Conversation: audio of interview with Douglas Rushkoff

Our conversation started with Rushkoff’s concept of “present-shock” and moved into a larger discussion of the relationship between market thinking, quantification, and what is ultimately measurable and knowable.

• So apparently there's a YouTube channel called PBS Idea Channel. This video poses the question, "are cell phones replacing reality?" and briefly engages Baudrillard's thoughts on hyperreality.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AXIAM7dTTg&w=560&h=315]

• This page on LearnStuff.com covers the life and work of Baudrillard and contains links to resources and further reading.

• WIRED's Dead Media Beat considers Lev Manovich's statement in a recent article that "there is no digital media, there is only software."

• "Drop the mic": an article about how the microphone changed Catholic mass.

In 1974, Marshall McLuhan argued that the microphone was the proximate cause both of the elimination of Latin from the Mass and of the turning around of the priest to face the congregation. Before microphones, a priest quietly said Mass in Latin, with his back to the congregation. From any distance, his voice was indistinct, although an instructed Catholic could follow what he was saying from a missal containing the Latin text of the Mass or a translation of it.

• "The humanism of Media Ecology": this address was delivered by Neil Postman at the 2000 MEA convention, but I just came across it and wanted to share it here.

I think there is considerable merit in McLuhan’s point of view about avoiding questions of good and bad when thinking about media. But that view has never been mine. To be quite honest about it, I don’t see any point in studying media unless one does so within a moral or ethical context. I am not alone in believing this. Some of the most important media scholars—Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul, for example—could scarcely write a word about technology without conveying a sense of either its humanistic or anti-humanistic consequences.