Im letzten Vortrag vor seinem plötzlichen Tod im Jahr 2018 gelang es Eric McLuhan, Sohn Marshall McLuhans, auf eindrückliche Weise sowohl die Positionen als auch Perspektiven einer bereits mehrere Jahrzehnte umfassenden interdisziplinären und internationalen ›Media Ecology‹ miteinander zu verknüpfen. Dieses Forschungsfeld thematisiert Medien nicht primär in einer eher traditionellen beziehungsweise konservativen Funktion als Vermittler von Informationen, sondern fokussiert bewusst die materielle und technologische Anwesenheit und Form von Medien innerhalb einer Kultur und betrachtet deren Einfluss auf Psyche und Verhalten von Individuen innerhalb mediatisierter Gesellschaften. Der Band möchte einen Raum schaffen für die Fortschreibung des McLuhan'sches Denkens im Kontext einer (post-)modernen ›Media Ecology‹. Inhaltlich flankiert wird Eric McLuhans hier erstmals im deutschsprachigen Diskurs publizierter Vortrag durch Beiträge von Oliver Ruf und Tobias Held sowie durch ein von Lars C. Grabbe geführtes Interview mit Eric McLuhans Sohn Andrew McLuhan.

The interplay of physical reality and media environments is getting enhanced by new technological innovations. We are living in the age of digital aesthetics and there is a need for individual, cultural or social forms and variations of media literacy. This book seeks the limits of media literacies, and to go beyond them. »Beyond Media Literacy« contributes to the wide range of the media literacy discourse with approaches in modern media theory, philosophy, art and film theory, computer graphics as well as the complex range of modern aesthetics. This volume monitors and discusses the relation of media and literacy in the context of media as environments with effects on psyche and society.

In the 1960s, The Beatles would address like no other musical act a radical shift in the cultural mindset of the late twentieth century. Through tools of "electric technology," this shift encompassed the decline of visual modes of perception and the emergence of a "way-of-knowing" based increasingly on sound. In this respect, the musical works of The Beatles would come to resonate with and ultimately reflect Marshall McLuhan's ideas on the transition into a culture of "all-at-once-ness" a simultaneous world in which immersion in vibrant global community increasingly trumps the fixed viewpoint of the individual. By engaging with recording technologies in a way that no popular act had before, The Beatles opened up for exploration the acoustical space precipitated by this shift. In The Beatles and McLuhan: Understanding the Electric Age, scholar and musician Thomas MacFarlane examines how the incorporation of electric technology in The Beatles' art would enhance their musical impact. MacFarlane surveys the relationship between McLuhan's ideas on the nature and effects of electric technology and The Beatles own engagement of that technology; offers analyses of key works from The Beatles' studio years, with particular attention paid to the presence of cultural metaphors embedded in the medium of multi-track recording; and collates these data to offer stunning conclusions about The Beatles' creative process in the recording studio and its cultural implications. This work also features the first published transcriptions ever of the complete filmed conversation between John Lennon and Marshall McLuhan on their respective ideas, as well as an interview between MacFarlane and McLuhan's son and executor, Michael McLuhan, on his father's and the Beatles' legacy. The Beatles and McLuhan will interest scholars and students of music and music history, recording technology, media studies, communications, and popular culture.

Understanding Media, Today. McLuhan in the Era of Convergence Culture

We think that we live in democracies: in fact, we live in mediarchies. Our political regimes are based less on nations or citizens than on audiences shaped by the media. We assume that our social and political destinies are shaped by the will of the people without realizing that ‘the people’ are always produced, both as individuals and as aggregates, by the media: we are all embedded in mediated publics, ‘intra-structured’ by the apparatuses of communication that govern our interactions. In this major book, Yves Citton maps out the new regime of experience, media and power that he designates by the term ‘mediarchy’. To understand mediarchy, we need to look both at the effects that the media have on us and also at the new forms of being and experience that they induce in us. We can never entirely escape from the effects of the mediarchies that operate through us but by becoming more aware of their conditioning, we can develop the new forms of political analysis and practice which are essential if we are to rise to the unprecedented challenges of our time. This comprehensive and far-reaching book will be essential reading for students and scholars in media and communications, politics and sociology, and it will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the multiple and complex ways that the media – from newspapers and TV to social media and the internet – shape our social, political and personal lives today.

In McLuhan's Techno-Sensorium City: Coming to Our Senses in a Programmed Environment, Jaqueline McLeod Rogers argues that Marshall McLuhan was both an activist and a speculative urbanist who drew from cross-disciplinary and ahistorical sources to explore constitutive exchanges between humanity and technologies to alter human perception and imagine a sustainable future based on collective participation in a responsive urban environment. This environment—a techno-sensorium—would endeavor to design and program technology to be favorable to life and capable of engaging with multiple senses. McLeod Rogers examines McLuhan’s active engagement with the vibrant art and urban design culture of his day to further understand the ways in which the links he drew between media, technology, space, architecture, art, and cities continue to inform current urban and art criticism and practices. Scholars of media studies, urbanism, philosophy, architecture, and sociology will find this book particularly useful.

Shared concern for nature can be a way of transcending national, ethnic, religious, and cultural boundaries, yet conservation efforts often pit the interests of historically rooted or indigenous peoples against the state and international environmental organizations, eroding local autonomy while “saving” rural land for animals and tourists. Wild Sardinia’s examination of the cultural politics around nature conservation and the traditional Commons on an Italian island illustrates the complexities of environmental stewardship. Long known as the home of fiercely independent shepherds (often typecast as rustics, bandits, or eco-vandals), as well as wild mouflon sheep, magnificent eagles, and rare old oak forests, the town of Orgosolo has for several decades received notoriety through local opposition to Gennargentu National Park. Interweaving rich ethnographic description of highland central Sardinia with analysis grounded in political ecology and reflexive cultural critique, Wild Sardinia illuminates the ambivalent and open-ended meanings of many Sardinians’ acts and memories of “resistance” to environmental projects. This groundbreaking case study of the tension between living cultural landscapes and the emerging ecological imaginaries envisioned through policy discourses and new media -- the “global dreamtimes of environmentalism” -- has relevance far beyond its Mediterranean locale.

Transversality is the keyword that permeates the spirit of these thirteen essays spanning almost half a century, from 1965 to 2009. The essays are exploratory and experimental in nature and are meant to be a transversal linkage between phenomenology and East Asian philosophy. Transversality is the concept that dispels all ethnocentrisms, including Eurocentrism. In the globalizing world of multiculturalism, Eurocentric universalism falls far short of being universal but simply parochial at the expense of the non-Western world. Transversality is intercultural, interspecific, interdisciplinary, and intersensorial. Transversal Rationality and Intercultural Texts means to transform the very way of philosophizing itself by infusing or hybridizing multiple traditions in the history of the world. Like no other scholar, Jung bridges the gap between Asian and Western cultures. By engaging Western philosophers as diverse as Bacon, Descartes, Heidegger, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Glissant, Barthes, Fenollosa, McLuhan, and Eastern philosophers such as Wang Yang-ming, Nishida Kitaro, Nishitani Keiji, Watsuji Tetsuro, Nhat Hanh, and Suzuki Daisetz Teitaro, this book marks an unparalleled contribution to comparative philosophy and the study of philosophy itself.

Situating the intellectual inheritance of Canadian Vorticists in a multidisciplinary assemblage of authors and artists.

Babe examines the writings of ten major thinkers in the context of their physical and cultural environments and finds that there is indeed a mode of theorizing that is quintessentially Canadian.