Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2005

This article interrogates the so-called “crisis in representation” as a symptom of forgotten alphabetic literacy. My analysis launches its critique by attending to John Stewart’s recent writings on “the symbol model” and advances through two main sections. The first reviews historical developments in alphabetic technologies, identifying both basic differences and early impacts. The second section addresses phenomenological differences between hearing and vision and attempts to document how alphabetic writing enables speech to be heard as it could be seen if it were written. In summary, I try to demonstrate how literacy, the modern condition of logos, inseparably fuses with “oral/aural articulate contact.”

In Laws of Media Marshall and Eric McLuhan propose a fourfold process of examination they call the tetrad, consisting of enhancements, obsolescences, retrievals, and reversals, which is applied here to cable television. Cable TV enhances the quality of the broadcast signal, obsolesces the physical antenna and ability (or need) to manipulate it for best reception, retrieves the penny press of the 19th century, and reverses into TiVo, ReplayTV, the World Wide Web, and eventually into the common carrier model of telephony. But the attendant social and cultural effects overshadow any effects deriving from content alone.

As service-learning programs grow in popularity in communication programs, the question of assessment takes on increasing importance. After reviewing the representative literature on service-learning and educational assessment, this article proposes a model for assessing service-learning programs and then applies that model through a secondary analysis of evaluative data collected over a 10-year period at a West Coast university.

Farrell, Thomas J. and Paul A. Soukup, eds. An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2004. 592 pp. Cloth $89.50, ISBN 1-57273-444-2. Paper $35.00, ISBN 1-57273-445-0.

Levinson, Paul. Realspace: The Fate of Physical Presence in the Digital Age, On and Off Planet. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. 176 pp. Cloth $24.95, ISBN 0-4152-7743-4.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Mechanical Bride. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2002. 158 pp. Cloth $35.00, ISBN 1-58423-050-9.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Critical Edition (W. Terrence Gordon, ed.) Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003. 611 pp. Cloth $24.95, ISBN 1-58423-073-8.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Me (Stephanie Mcluhan and David Staines, eds.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 317 pp. Cloth $27.95, ISBN 0-262-13442-X. Paper $15.95, ISBN 0-262-63317-5.

McLuhan, Marshall, and David Carson. The Book of Probes. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003. 573 pp. Cloth $39.95, ISBN 1-58423-056-8.