In 1962, Marshal McLuhan published The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Drawing a line from the structural transformation that the printing press had on social consciousness, he frames the march of history as guided by the telos an information system. “The medium is the message,” he famously proclaimed. Society is defined by a canonical medium and its communicative forms. “Typographic Man” comes to represent a new humanity, a ‘global village’ shaped in the practices of discourse and social participation defined by its media of communication.
In this history, we see the early traces of what was soon to become an “electronic age.” McLuhan captures the speculative zeitgeist of a pre-internet moment. Now 30 years since the birth of the world wide web, how has this transformed medium lived up to this speculative imagination of a universal, global, social consciousness? We now live in an age that captures, structures, and interprets masses of data – a data galaxy. These processes define a new medium – the internet. In this moment, do we see an ‘un-making’ of ‘typographic humanity’ as a kind of universal project of history? And if so, what takes its place in the speculative imagination?
The Sixth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies featured plenary speakers by some of the world's leading thinkers and innovators in the field.
Assistant Professor, University of Toronto Scarborough and the Faculty of Information at University of Toronto, Canada
Assistant Professor and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, Canada
Assistant Professor, York University, Toronto, Canada
"Platform Feminism: A Theory of Mediated Elevation"
Jarislowsky Democracy Chair, Ryerson University, Canada
Catedrático en Ecología de los Medios y Periodismo Imagético, Universidad Estadual Paulista, Brasil
(Spanish Language Plenary Speaker)
Profesor, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España
(Spanish Language Plenary Speaker)
For each conference, a small number of Emerging Scholar Awards are given to outstanding graduate students and emerging scholars who have an active research interest in the conference themes. Emerging Scholars perform a critical role in the online conference by commenting and engaging the parallel sessions, and presenting their own research papers. The 2021 Emerging Scholar Award recipients are as follows:
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Gandhinagar, India
International Institute of Journalism, Nigeria
Regent University, USA
Tomas Bata University, Czech Republic
Kishinchand Chellaram College, India
Leiden University, Netherlands
York University, Canada
Ebonyi State University, Nigeria
