What's "The Canadian School" of Media Theory?

Posted on March 3, 2012 by friesenn

 

(Hint: It’s NOT the same thing as the Toronto School of Communications.)

I’ve been working with Darryl Cressman on an article on “Die kanadische Schule” for a German Handbook of Media Studies. The piece will be translated and then published by Metzler (the Metzler Dictionary of Media Studies and Media Theory, already in print, is to the right).

Here’s how we explain the difference between the two “schools:”

To speak of a general Canadian school of media theory is to use a specifically German label, one that can be traced to Kittler’s Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, where he inaccurately attributes the term to Arthur Kroker’s Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant. …A Canadian school of media theory and Toronto school of communication both refer to the same general intellectual output, but differences in each name” and frames this output is significant. To speak of the “Toronto school” is to see this work as a local approach to communication, suggesting that it was a faction within the larger, contemporaneous and mainly empirical study of communication. To speak of a “Canadian school” suggests something much more substantial, namely the founding, as Dieter Mersch describes, of a “general theory of media” or of the original introduction of “the term ‘media’ as it is used in cultural theory today.”

See the entire article on the Canadian School (pdf).

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The Multiversity and Learning on a Shoestring Budget

Posted on February 25, 2012 by friesenn

An excellent article has just appeared in The Times Higher Education Supplement: “Cap and Gown Learning on a Shoestring Budget.”

It focuses on low- and no-cost educational options that are starting to emerge as Open Educational Resources are not only accumulate, but are organized into groups and programs, and are (only very gradually) associated with credentials.

One sentence in particular caught my attention:

“some businesses that reimburse employees’ tuition fees are also becoming interested in free- and low-cost online education providers. This could put more pressure on traditional universities to accept academic credits from outside sources…”

I would only qualify this compelling claim by saying that this would put more pressure on parts of the university that respond very directly to businesses that reimburse employees’ tuition fees. This would include a range of disciplines and programs, but only a part of what the university offers. Particularly affected would be professional graduate programs (e.g., business itself), but large parts would remain unaffected (e.g., the general BA).

It may be helpful to recall that Clark Kerr (Berkeley U’s president during the tumultuous ’60’s; pictured above trying to placate student protest) characterized the modern university as a “Multiversity.” This refers to a loose collection of communities or groups rather than a unity implied in the term university:

the community of the undergraduate and the community of the graduate; the community of the humanist, the community of the social scientist, and the community of the scientist; the communities of the professional schools; the community of all the nonacademic personnel; the community of the administrators.

The point is that the university is a conglomerate, not a monolith: some communities, some programs and functions cobbled together in an institution that has encompassed everything from agriculture to zymology are more vulnerable than others. The multiplicity of elements that the “Multiversity” implies is certain to continue to change, with some elements being more susceptible to alternative models of organization and accreditation than others.

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"Certain Media Biases:" Lecturing via TV, Radio, Text

Posted on January 23, 2012 by friesenn

In completing a research project looking into McLuhan, media theory and education, I’ve been reading about an early experiment on “certain media biases” and the pedagogical form of the lecture. Download a .pdf of the initial report, originally published in 1954 in Explorations. The New York Times (right) reported on it as well. Marchand’s McLuhan biography, provides a brief excellent overview:

One of the more interesting experiments the seminar group conducted was an attempt, orchestrated by Carpenter, to demonstrate that different media of communication did indeed have an effect quite apart from the content of information they conveyed. In the spring of 1954 more than one hundred students were divided into four groups. At the local studios of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, one group watched a lecture delivered on television, a second attended the same lecture delivered in a television studio, a third listened to it over the radio, and a fourth read it in printed form. All groups then took an exam to test their comprehension and retention of the contents of the lecture. As Carpenter later wrote in Explorations, “About twenty of us in the seminar placed bets on the outcome. Academics all, we each seriously thought print would win and merely selected other media as sporting bet.” It was the group watching the lecture on television that scored highest in the test, however. The print group scored lower than even the radio listeners.

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German Documentary: McLuhan – Visionary of the Media Age

Posted on December 16, 2011 by friesenn

German Documentary: M. McLuhan: Visionary of the Media Age from Norm Friesen on Vimeo. (The entire broadcast can be viewed here.)

Interviewer: …but [he] wasn’t a systematizer

Martina Leeker (media studies, Cologne): …that makes it perhaps difficult to work with him in Germany. …but that is also part of the enormous wealth that he brings.

Interviewer: what surprises me about McLuhan, when one thinks about media theory and media philosophy, is that one has the feeling that since his time, not much has happened. Why is he still so great/important?

Lutz Hachmeister (media historian/filmaker): yes, well Tom Wolfe, the American author and journalist wrote that [McLuhan] is to be categorized with Einstein, Newton and Freud. Wolfe asked “what if he is right?” That was in 1965. And I think that today we can say that he is indeed in this league. He is a completely outstanding intellectual of the 20th century. …One of the few people who after reading three, four pages in the Medium is the Massage, which for us was the mao bible of communications studies (i.e. in the ’60s), who opens a fully new world of knowledge. And I know of no other author in this field of media theory / communications studies who has provided me with this –even now.

Frank Schirrmacher (editor-in-chief of the national daily FAZ): And what you are saying about there not being anyone else: we can be certain of that today. But there was a time of latency, a time in-between. I can say for myself: I read him differently than Hachmeister, somewhat later I believe (although we are the same age). He was an antidote, an antidote -–if one was interested in culture and media– against a force(?) that was at that time very strong, with great moral strength, in Germany. This was the critique of the consciousness and culture industry. We all know the names: Adorno of course, Enzensberger, the Frankfurt School…

Besides his rather un-German lack of systematicity, what stands out in the German reception of McLuhan is that he earlier presented and still presents an alternative (“antidote”) to Marxist critiques of culture and media. Instead of the Frankfurt school’s rejection of nearly all modern media (outside of established “bourgeois” culture) as expressions of industrialized manipulation, McLuhan’s media theory or philosophy is seen as offering something very different. This exchange is fairly consistent with other claims about McLuhan in the German context, and the assumptions behind and implications of these claims are interesting. Most importantly, McLuhan is considered to be a theorist and philosopher, equal or indeed superior to the likes of Adorno and others in the Frankfurt school. This gives McLuhan’s work a broader scope and significance than describing him (for example) as a pop prophet or patron saint. The latter kinds of labels give his authority a religious flavour, and suggest that it derives from his anticipation of recent technological developments. The German reception has granted him the stature of a philosopher, theorist and intellectual, and has also shown that his work can sustain a dialogue on this level.

 

(For a few further thoughts on these questions, see Friesen, N. (2011). Marshalling McLuhan for Media Theory. English Studies in Canada. 36(2-3) pp. 5-9. Draft available at:  http://learningspaces.org/papers/Marshalling_McLuhan.pdf).

Posted in Friedrich Kittler, Marshall McLuhan, Media Theory | Leave a comment

RUOpen? OERu and Open Learning

Posted on December 13, 2011 by friesenn

A presentation by Wayne Mackintosh, hosted at a panel on Open Education held at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) on Oct. 20, 2011. Wayne Talks about openness in education, OERu, and points to some possibilities for TRU’s future role in it.

To view all the videos from this panel presentation (i.e. Lalita Rajasingham’s presentation and the discussion afterwards, see: http://ruopen.tru.ca/

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Open Learning 2.0? Aligning Student, Teacher & Content for Openness

Posted on December 12, 2011 by friesenn

Just completed a paper outlining a new model for exploring openness in education. This model is developed by and for Open Learning at Thompson Rivers University, and the paper is co-written with Judith Murray, VP of the Open Learning division.

Here’s the abstract:

“The mission of Thompson Rivers University (TRU) Open Learning (OL) is understood in terms of the interrelation of three entities: the student, the faculty member and the curriculum content. Where they interconnect—with a TRU-OL student working with TRU-OL courseware, being supported by a TRU-OL faculty member—is where learning, assessment and ultimately, credentialing take place. These three elements can be interrelated as points in a triangle, with assessment and credentialing in the centre. However, given the “open” content and services envisioned by the OER (Open Educational Resource) university and other initiatives, TRU-OL is currently exploring the results of defining these three elements differently. Instead of designating TRU-OL students, TRU-OL teachers and TRU-OL contents, specifically, these elements can serve as placeholders for any students, any instructional personnel or supports, and any open content. These can, in theory, all be shared, opened and disaggregated among various institutions, while assessment and credentialing remain as the principal service offered locally. The purpose of this paper is to explain this model in the context of the “open educational” movement, to describe its various permutations, and to consider the questions and objections that may arise in relation to it. It is thus intended to inform and invite discussion concerning a new set of “open” educational possibilities.”

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(Re)Inventing the Internet: Critical Case Studies

Posted on November 15, 2011 by friesenn

Just received the cover design for a book I’m editing with Andrew Feenberg.

Here’s the table of contents, and below, some sentences to appear on the back cover:

This book examines examples of controversy and contestation from the Internet, focusing on the political and technological dynamics at play. The cases cover networked gaming cultures, online education, surveillance, as well as the mutual shaping of digital technologies and civic life.

…the Internet remains a contested technology. Its governance and role in civic life, education, and entertainment are all still openly disputed and debated. The issues include censorship and network control, privacy and surveillance, the political impact of activist blogging, peer to peer file sharing, the effects of video games on children, and many others. Media conglomerates, governments and users all contribute to shaping the forms and functions of the Internet as the limits and potentialities of the technologies are tested and extended. What is most surprising about the Internet is the proliferation of controversies and conflicts in which the creativity of ordinary users plays a central role. The title, (Re)Inventing the Internet, refers to this extraordinary flowering of agency in a society that tends to reduce its members to passive spectators. This collection presents a series of critical case studies that examine specific sites of change and contestation. These cover a range of phenomena including computer gaming cultures, online education, surveillance, and the mutual shaping of digital technologies and civic life.

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Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors

Posted on November 15, 2011 by friesenn

Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors from Ben Mendelsohn on Vimeo.

A short documentary, sounding almost like a commentary and update on Innis’ Empire & Communications: It reminds us that the Internet is very much a physical infrastructure, with one of its major hubs located at 60 Hudson St. NY, just a few blocks from the former World Trade Centre. (Seeing the 2-storey Palo Alto Internet Exchange, another major hub, is particularly entertaining.) Why 60 Hudson Street? It is where “conduit[s],” pneumatic tube, telegraph, telephone, etc. have long been piggybacked on one another. “Any [existing] conduit is good conduit,” after all. And just as important, it is at a centre of multiple, intersecting empires (national, corporate, financial, etc.).

It would be great to see a similar video about the location and function of major server farms (i.e. the iron constituting “the cloud”) that are the material substrate for videos like this.

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Friedrich Kittler (1943 – 2011)

Posted on October 19, 2011 by friesenn

Yesterday (Oct. 18), marked the end of the life & career of a media theorist who played an important role in changing what media studies is and (maybe?) might come to mean. One German newspaper (the Baadischer Zeitung) said this about Kltter: “Nietzsche and Heidegger were at the epicentre of his thought, as were Foucault, Derrida, Lacan –through whose eyes he also turned to Freud… But what was fundamentally new was that he interpreted this tradition on the basis of information theory and media theory.”

This last statement is evident in his affirmation of the university as a site (the site, really) of open information creation and circulation. As a number of universities in Canada continue to join initiatives that have digital openness in research and teaching at their core, his remarks from his recent paper on Universities in Critical Inquiry are worth (re)considering:

Actual knowledge needs places to produce, store, and transmit itself independently of any company. What better places are there than universities? This applies just as much to digitally processed data as to the digitalized data of history. In the first case, the plans of enormous scientific publishing houses to monopolize academic journals are probably doomed to failure because Ph.D. advisers, getting at the data much earlier, can publish them digitally. The same holds true for free source code. …Whereas in Gutenberg’s time the university had to renounce its storage monopoly, its leading role in processing and transmitting now remains as crucial as ever. In this climate of academic freedom, ever-new codes and chips have to be developed in order to climb from the all too low level of zeroes and ones to higher levels of filtering and processing digital data streams.

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Live Streaming Event: How open is *your* Education?

Posted on October 12, 2011 by friesenn

This event brings together two international experts in open and global education, to discuss the future of education:

  • Dr. Wayne Mackintosh, a committed advocate and user of free software for education. He is the founder of WikiEducator (www.WikiEducator.org), an international community of educators collaborating on the development of free teaching materials in support of all national curricula by 2015.
  • Dr. Lalita Rajasingham, the co-author of two ground-breaking books: In Search of the Virtual Class: Education in an Information Society (1995) introduced the concepts of virtual classes and virtual universities. The Global Virtual University (2003) sketches a foundation for the future of the university in an era of globalisation.

The event will take be live-streamed at http://ruopen.tru.ca on Oct. 20, 2011 starting at 2:30 PM PST or 22:30 UTC/GMT.

UPDATE: The event and livestream will BEGIN 30 MINUTES LATER than originally announced: 2:30 PST or 22:30 GMT/UTC.

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