[Live Video] Thinking Beyond Content: McLuhan and Probes

In the eleventh video of Adam Niven' s #FBLiveVideoChallenge for Media Theology Adam introduces Marshall McLuhan and one of his probes about media.

[Live Video] Transformers and Proclaimers: What's that all about?

This is the fourth video of Adam Niven' s #FBLiveVideoChallenge for Media Theology. In it Adam expands on the terms Transformers and Proclaimers as they are presented in Woods and Patton's Prophetically Incorrect: A Christian Introduction to Media Criticism.

We're going FB Live for a Month

So you may, or may not have noticed, that the blog became a bit dormant again over the last little while. Part of that has been finding the time to sit down at the computer and actually type out a blog post. Well at least to create something that also has a level of value. But a solution is at hand...

#mcprobe: New Media Aren't Tools for the Church; They're Tools that Alter the Church

With new media devices and new media technologies, the Church continues to consider how these tools may be put in service of the Church. But like the rest of culture, the Church is not immune to the way these tools go to work at reshaping it as they are embraced.

#mcprobe :: it started here

Being too young to have been exposed to McLuhan in his heyday, my discovery came a number of years ago was kind of like pulling a loose thread on a woolen sweater. Like many, my first exposure was to his most infamous aphorism

the medium is the message

but without notice, it became: the medium is the massage; the medium is the mess-age; the medium is the mass-age; the tedium is the message; and  the tedium is the mass-age. All of a sudden I had my hands full of loose wool and McLuhan was saying "See, it's a unicorn".

The Resurgence of Vinyl Records and the Rhythm of Life

Having been a collector of music on vinyl record for around 20 years now, it's a bit of a treat to be seeing a resurgence in its availability.

which kind of fits with McLuhan's tetrad concept of retrieval...where a previously obsolesced medium is brought back in a new way...

And whilst it's not a pure retrieval sense, because there's not a new medium that is retrieving the vinyl, perhaps it is a growing awareness in some of the ways the rapidly shifting media ecology is having unwanted impacts on our relationship with music.