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20 June 2020
Because I sleep only 3 hours every 24 hours, I was able to attend a great many of the panels at the MEA online convention this past week.
It was the first media ecology conference I’ve ever attended, and it was perhaps the most significant and interesting one because it became obvious to me that the discipline of media ecology had reached a crossroads, perhaps even a crisis point (Max Weber’s “routinization of charisma”).
It was also a surprise to find out in the early hours of the first day that I was declared to be a “persona non grata” by Lance Strate.
Nobody made any subsequent effort to exclude me from the conference, perhaps because I had paid my fifty dollars, or because nobody agreed with Lance.
I managed to attend all of the panels led by the female scholars concerned with inclusivity and diversity. So did Lance Strate.
I even ended up in the randomly-created 5-person room with Lance at the final resolution panel where Lance had to take the brunt of polite and modest criticism that subsequently dominated the final “wrap-up session” for MEA members.
I, of course, was not permitted to attend that final session since I wasn’t a member. At least, I assumed that.
But I did get two emails with brief summaries of the final conclave.
They informed me that:
1. “It looks like the leadership of the MEA just diversity-and-inclusioned themselves out of a job!”
2. “In the wrap-up there was some discussion about how the online format for this year’s conference will be one that will be examined and copied for many other conventions in the future. Then Salvatore J Fallica from the Norman Mailer Society said that their members were ‘very impressed’ with the conference and how it was run. You probably interacted with all of them, so good on you for representing the MEA so well and giving them such a good impression. :)”
Interesting, eh?
As Corinne McLuhan said in the CBC’s TELESCOPE feature on Marshall McLuhan in 1967: “Marshall’s work always seemed so logical to me. Perhaps I’ve been brainwashed.”
As issues of racism, gender, and class (all issues intensified by the Gutenberg Galaxy) seemed to eventually preoccupy the climax of the convention, not one media ecologist managed to appropriate the always useful patterns of McLuhan’s version of media ecology and stop everybody in their discarnate tracks with the shock of recognition, arrest, and the retracing of the stages of apprehension.
Namely, that the “social media” of Web 2.0 have amplified/replayed/evoked worldwide the post- or para-information society of the first half of the 20th Century.
For Marshall McLuhan’s “take” on this global-village situation, see JOHN DOS PASSOS: Technique vs. Sensibility (1951), in THE INTERIOR LANDSCAPE: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan (1943-1962), Selected, compiled, and edited by Eugene McNamara, pp.49-62, 1969.
Why and how?:
“Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws. Nature now pays 5 million %. Applied science now the master usurer. To hell with our top soil. We can grow potatoes on the moon tomorrow. How you goan to expose that while there is still human ‘life’ on the planet?” – Marshall McLuhan, LETTERS OF MARSHALL McLUHAN, Edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987, p.219
“LIFE Jan1/51 War assets issue. Pin-up girls featured as major asset. I have tried, in forthcoming (March) Mechanical Bride to devise a technique for elucidating this scene. It can’t be satirized. Trouble with duffers like Geo. Orwell is that they satirize something that happened 50 yrs ago as a threat of the future ! Effect is narcotic.” – Marshall McLuhan, LETTERS OF MARSHALL McLUHAN, Edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987, p.219
“As the information that constitutes the environment is perpetually in flux, so the need is not for fixed concepts but rather for the ancient skill of reading that book, for navigating through an EVER UNCHARTED AND UNCHARTABLE MILIEU.” – Marshall and Eric McLuhan, LAWS OF MEDIA: The New Science, 1988, the penultimate sentence of the last page (239)
“When writing was introduced in the 5th century BC, it scrapped the old tribal traditions of Homer and Hesiod, but retrieved the private, individual man, an ancient form dredged up from way, way back.” – Brenn Stilley, MARSHALL McLUHAN: Culture Becomes Show Biz, ROLLING STONE Magazine, Nov.12, 1970, p.1
“Our role today is not to communicate.” – Marshall McLuhan, CBC, 1970.
“BLESS the locomotives WHISTLING on the prairies proclaiming the SEPARATENESS Of Man” – Marshall McLuhan, COUNTERBLAST, 1954, p.10“Planet of the Dead” – Marshall McLuhan, Cover of THE INNIS HERALD, Edited by Carl Scarfe, 1977 (more details later)
Perhaps they will say I’m not a member of the MEA and that is true.
But I’m a member of their FB page, otherwise I couldn’t post on it.
They deleted an important post I made last Friday about the
Mailer-Muggeridge-McLuhan CBC broadcast in 1968 that Paul Krassner’s THE REALIST transcribed that Autumn. The YouTube of this broadcast provides only a short excerpt.
Well, if they are going to be silly, I will inform the lurkers here that Derrick de Kerckhove informed me a couple of days ago that even though the MEA gave Derrick THE MEDIUM AND THE LIGHT award last Wednesday or Thursday, they wouldn’t give Derrick the password so he could engage the online convention. He especially wanted to watch Maryanne Wolf’s Featured Speaker address.
Derrick speculated that they blocked him because he was doing a series on my Internet radio show.
Derrick and I don’t know if this is actually the reason they wouldn’t give him the password. There may be another reason but he requested the password in several emails to Paul Soukup.
