Figure/Ground Communication

Thanks to YOUR support, Figure/Ground Communication is now officially a finalist in two categories at the West Coast Social Media Awards. The competition now moves to its last phase, where a panel of independent judges will evaluate each candidate’s potential and ultimately select one (1) winner in each category.

The winners will be announced on Friday, June 8th at the awards dinner at the Victoria Conference Centre. For more information and to purchase your ticket, click here.

© Eric McLuhan and Figure/Ground Communication.
Dr. McLuhan was interviewed by Laureano Ralon on August 1st, 2010.

Eric McLuhan is an internationally known lecturer on communication and media, the son of Herbert Marshall McLuhan. He has over 30 years of teaching experience in subjects ranging from high-speed reading techniques to English literature, media, and communication theory. He has taught at many colleges and universities in both the United States and Canada. He has published articles in magazines and professional journals since 1964 on media, perception, and literature. He co-authored City as Classroom (Irwin, 1977), with Marshall McLuhan and Kathryn (Hutchon) Kawasaki, and assisted McLuhan with research and writing of The Medium is the Massage, War and Peace in the Global Village,Culture is Our Business, From Cliché to Archetype, Take Today: The Executive as Drop-Out, and most notably, Laws of Media: The New Science (University of Toronto Press, 1988). In this interview with Figure/Ground Communications, Eric focuses primarily on the genesis of Laws of Media: The New Science.

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© Noam Chomsky and Figure/Ground Communication.
Professor Chomsky was interviewed via Skype by Laureano Ralon and Axel Eljatib on December 17th, 2010.

Noam Chomsky is an internationally renowned scholar, author, and activist. He has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955, where he developed a theory of transformational grammar that revolutionized the scientific study of language. He is a prolific author whose principal linguistic works after Syntactic Structuresinclude Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964), The Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle, 1968), Language and Mind (1972), Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), and Knowledge of Language (1986). In addition, he has wide-ranging political interests. He was an early and outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and has written extensively on many political issues from a generally left-wing point of view.

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© Douglas Rushkoff and Figure/Ground Communication
Rushkoff was interviewed by Laureano Ralon on April 24th, 2011

Winner of the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values. He teaches media studies at NYU and the New School University, serves as technology columnist for The Daily Beast, and lectures around the world. His new book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, a follow-up to his Frontline documentary, Digital Nation, is just out. His last book, an analysis of the corporate spectacle called Life Inc., was also made into a short, award-winning film. His ten best-selling books on new media and popular culture have been translated to over thirty languages. They include Cyberia, Media Virus, Playing the Future, Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism, Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out and Coercion, winner of the Media Ecology Association’s Marshall Mcluhan Award for best media book.

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By STEPHEN MARCHE

Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. A report on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our society. Continue reading »

Distance education courses are becoming an increasingly popular method for students to take college courses. More and more institutions are adopting this format for courses, as can be seen by visiting this site that lists accredited online courses from various colleges and universities. The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy is proud to make distance enrolment available for those who can’t make it to our classes in Melbourne.  The audio from each course will be recorded and made available for download.  The audio files are provided as unedited lectures just as they were given (with the exception of material excluded for copyright purposes, i.e. film clips used in the Hitchcock course).  Lecturers will also provide some supplementary material such as diagrams or slides used in the lectures.  Enrolled students will also be able to email some questions to the individual lecturers.

Continue reading »

By Mike Plugh*

In a recent piece at Salon.com, University of Maryland doctoral student Nathan Jurgenson offered his views on commentary by Noam Chomsky, critical of Twitter and other forms of social media. Jurgenson suggests that Chomsky’s critique is one in a line of many high-minded attacks on social media, produced by individuals with both feet firmly planted in the literate elite. He notes, “Among other things, Chomsky and Co. are making assertions that one way of communicating, thinking and knowing is better than another.” Continue reading »

I just heard from Junichi Miyazawa, Associate Professor in the School of Cultural and Creative Studies at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, that a famous Japanese pop culture magazine will dedicate its upcoming issue to Marshall McLuhan. It’s coming out on February 19th through Amazon Japan, and the publisher is Kawade Shobo Shinsha. The feature contains a Japanese translation by Junichi Miyazawa himself of the interview I did with Eric as part of the Figure/Ground scholarly interview series.