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ARTICLES
Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan is credited with predicting the cultural effect of the Internet and has been adopted the patron saint of Wired Magazine. McLuhan coined the term "the global village", a phrase which is often used now to describe the community of "netizens" on the Net.
The combination of new technologies and a large number of specialty cable channels are making television a
generalizing medium. As we apparently become more specialized, we are actually becoming more generalized.
There seems little to suggest that an American moon mission and the Canadian legislative process might form the basis for a heated and dynamic dialogue about social values in North America. That is, unless spacecraft and law are considered as communication media, each with its own innate message.
McLuhan says the artistic imagination can act as an "early warning system" in sensing coming shifts in the techno-structure. Does the artist have a privileged place in enabling the social body to advance into the frontiers of the unknown?
You are suddenly blinded by a row of airplane lights etching your retina.The medium is the message. Words and images bombard you, flashing across television monitors at speeds that make comprehension impossible. Welcome to U2's ZooTV.
In The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan discusses the advertising industry's desire to control the public mind. "Many minds are engaged in bringing about the condition of public helplessness..." A program of enlightening the prey should be developed.
Canadian technology has been improving for the last decade as exemplified by one of the most successful and, at the same time, unrecognized pieces of high-technology built by Canadians--the Primary Robotic Arm.
In the forty-eight years since its inception, television has become a force with dangerous side-effects in its effect on the behavior of children. |
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First Harold Innis and then Marshall McLuhan provided a theoretical approach to media at the University of Toronto from the l940's to the l970's. Both argued that each medium has it's own properties and produces it's own unique effects. Harold Innis-A Canadian Communication Theorist Maureen McIntyre
Like Harold Adams Innis, writer Margaret Atwood has explored what it means to be a Canadian on the edge of a powerful communications empire. As much as with our notorious quest for identity, we have been concerned with cultural survival.
TV, because of its positioning, structure and content has an amazing effect on our subconscious. An effect more insidious than obvious commercialism and general brain rot because it is clandestine and incalculable.
Why is it that our culture is so ready to adopt new technologies into our lives without first questioning their impact? Are these technologies providing a new alchemy in our culture?
Moses Znaimer is one of Canada's most creative television producers and entrepreneurs. Is this the CanCon we're looking for?
Society, thinking itself civilized, has assimilated the television set and the World Wide Web into a different war played out on the drum of advertising.
In its introduction, McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride alludes to "the relatively puny offerings sponsored by schools and colleges" to counteract the devious ploys of the ever-expanding advertisement and entertainment industry. Though some institutions have made an attempt to educate people on these issues, society generally has little or no protection from the tyrant which is mass media.
Media Imperalism occurs when one society's media dominate another country's culture. Since television production depends largely on advertising revenue, its content is determined by profits and does not necessarily promote Canadian culture or national identity.
All rights remain with the individual authors. Fair dealing provisions apply.
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