A look at McLuhan and meaning

Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan died in 1980.  I so wished that he had lived to witness the advent of the internet and digital culture.  I would have liked to have invited him to dinner and ask him about how society and humankind have changed as a result of the introduction of the World Wide Web.  In this article S. Brent Plate revisits McLuhan's understanding of meaning.

"The Mediation of Meaning"

One of the numerous reasons why the American public did not like the war in Vietnam was due to the fact that our media had television reporters embedded among our forces. Americans could turn on their TV sets and see Walter Cronkite and other journalists report what was happening. During WWII the public had to go to the movies to see the news on film before the start of the show. Such "news" might have resembled more of a subjective PR piece than objective journalism.

I see a correlation with General Conference 2012. One of the reasons why so many of us clergy and laity have been disgruntled with what happened at GC is due to the fact that we vicariously have experienced the blow-by-blow depictions of the proceedings thanks to our embedded journalists, i.e., our delegates who reported from the front lines via social media. The employment of such citizen journalism opened the eyes of us back home. Thank you delegates who shared with us. Thank Web 2.0 for allowing us to reply and thus continue the conversation.

Ready to learn for 2011

I learned much and earned a 4.0 in my first official semester in the doctoral program at the University of Texas at Dallas.  I am studying Emerging Media And Communication as part of the Arts and Humanities department's Doctor of Philosophy in Humanities with a major in Arts and Technology.

Movin' on up for the Fall 2010 semester

Are you interested in social media?  Are you eager to see how to apply the latest in social media to improve your congregation's ministries?  So am I.  Because I have learned so much during my first academic year at the University of Texas at Dallas in their Emerging Media And Communication master's program and have witnessed how much these ideas can help local congregations, for my second year I am switching to their Ph.D. program.

University of Texas at Dallas -- Ph.D.