Mark Federman

The secret to McLuhan is this: his genius lay more in how  he thought than in what he anticipated.  Hidden in his vast body of work is a way of looking at our shape-shifting world to reveal the myriad transformations lurking around the corner. McLuhan is not an oracle to be consulted, but an intellectual springboard from which to make one¹s own conceptual leaps of insight and intuition.

The authors of this book blow the lid off McLuhan’s secret. They have mined his writings and have  done a masterful job of setting out McLuhan’s core ideas clearly and in the context of our current digital challenges. But this is just the backdrop to their real task, articulating a set of thinking tools based on McLuhan’s unique way of assessing the future.

It is these tools that makes this book particularly useful to business decisionmakers. Business decisionmakers? Hardly the first audience that comes to mind when thinking about McLuhan, but it turns out that McLuhan’s ideas and approach to forecasting are potent business tools for our uncertain times. Business today is about peripheral vision ­ the ability to look ahead and identify the subtle indicators of fundamental changes lurking over the horizon.  McLuhan accomplished this with extraordinary skill, applying his unique blend of tools, from noticing the unnoticed,  structured questioning and investigatory “probes.”

McLuhan is thus very relevant to business, but there is more to the story of this book than the mere presentation of powerful new business tools. McLuhan was concerned with the impact of technology on culture and society, and of course business is a foundational part of the social equation.  In the 1960s, this seemed a radical idea; today it is taken for granted to such a degree that we demand that our business leaders and the companies they guide step up to ever higher standards of social responsibility.  Business is no longer just about doing well, it is also about doing good in sustainable ways that make sense for both the doer and society at large.

The tools set forth in this book are powerful vehicles in furthering this larger purpose.  The farther one sees, the better decisions one can make, both for companies and the societies they exist within.  McLuhan often pleaded that he was a mere observer, but of course that was nonsense. The Man who reminded us that we lived in an ever shrinking, ever more interdependent world was not an observer, but an activist. What the authors of this book have done is deliver fargazing tools for business activists. The electronic revolution’s patron saint, the Sage of Aquarius would be pleased.

a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium- that is, of any extension of ourselves- result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. " (McLuhan, 1964, p. 7) Thus begins the classic work of Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, in which he introduced the world to his enigmatic paradox, "The medium is the message. " But what does it

Barrington Nevitt and Maurice McLuhan ask, “Who was Marshall McLuhan?” (Nevitt & McLuhan, 1995) and in a series of interviews and reminiscences with colleagues, collaborators and students, attempt to answer that question. Throughout their book, Nevitt and Maurice McLuhan explore aspects of Marshall McLuhan’s life, work and method in order to provide the reader a vicarious experience of the late professor’s unusual and often controversial approach to observing the world. But rather than exploring the man by asking “who?” perhaps a more revealing approach might be to explore his work by asking “what?” – what was Marshall McLuhan? By taking an uncommon standpoint, and considering his body of work refracted through an admittedly unconventional analytic prism, we have the opportunity to re-evaluate his unique style, turn his own method back on himself, and in doing so, perhaps reveal new insight and observational tools for our world.

This thesis traces the history of organization from the society of Ancient Athens, through the medieval Church, the Industrial Age, and the 20 century – the latter characterized by the Bureaucratic, Administratively controlled, and Hierarchical (BAH) organization – until today’s contemporary reality of Ubiquitous Connectivity and Pervasive Proximity (UCaPP). Organizations are rarely, if ever, entirely BAH or entirely UCaPP, but do tend to have tendencies and behaviours that are more consistent with either end of a spectrum delineated by this duality. Valence Theory defines organization as being an emergent entity whose members (individuals or organizations) are connected via two or more of five valence (meaning uniting, bonding, interacting, reacting, combining) relationships. Each of these relationships – Economic, Socio-psychological, Identity, Knowledge, and Ecological – has a fungible (mercantile or tradable) aspect, and a ba-aspect that creates a space-and-place of common, taci...

Conventional cyber-education environments do not actualize adult education principles. A design that implements Grace’s (1998) Theory of Adult Learning Community is demonstrated. A plethora of recent research has focused attention on barriers and enablers to adoption, implementation, and design of effective cyber-education approaches. However, the problematics of the most common cyber-education environment – threaded forums – have been identified among a number of researchers (Klemm, 2002; Serce and Yildirim, 2006; Thomas, 2002). Adult educators must ask whether espoused principles of Adult Education can be enacted in a cyber-education environment. Federman (2006) argues that threaded-forum-based cybereducation is hegemonic and reproduces traditional teacher-student power dynamics. In particular, the focus on instrumentality and interactions with the instructor rather than learner peers, and isolation of student’s ideas, contrasts with espoused virtues of collaboration, conversation...

During the 2 World War, some tribes in Melanesia – notable Vanuatu – enjoyed the relative prosperity provided by the constant supply of matériel from the US Navy and Military. Once the war ended and the military bases were closed, the flow of material goods ended. The islanders, eager to entice spiritual deities and ancestors to once again bless them with such prosperity, created physical replicas of the objects they believed to be the link between the earthly realm and the supernatural source of plenty: the created mock airstrips, aircraft and control towers made out of sticks, radios fashioned from coconuts and straw, and ersatz uniforms. They mimicked the military drill behaviours that they observed among the wartime foreigners all in an attempt to once again attract the wealth of manufactured goods to drop from the sky and arrive from the sea.

efore we begin, I’d like to ask how many people in the audience today have heard speakers talking about innovation, motivation, or some other “-ation?” I’ve heard a bunch of them in my time, and many of them follow a similar pattern. The speaker comes on stage and tells you a story – a success story – how some company turned itself around, or how they, themselves achieved some seemingly super-human goal, or how an unsuspecting person rose from adversity to conquer a life challenge. All very heroic. And then, either explicitly or by implication, the speaker will instruct you to go and be like them. Go do what they did. Be inspired to be your best. Just emulate their courage, their fortitude, their drive, their perseverance, their inventiveness, and you too will be successful. In other words, those motivational speakers turn into your mother – or at least my mother. “Why can’t you be like George down the street?” Or the corporate version: “Why can’t you innovate and be successful like...

Some might argue that organization simply reflects the means through which people come together to collaboratively accomplish some set of common objectives. Others may critically argue that organization has become a self-perpetuating end in itself, in a fashion analogous to that used by Castells to describe a bureaucracy (1996, p. 171). I suggest that neither conception is adequate to account for the plethora of diverse effects and interactions of organizations in the context of our contemporary, globalized world. A potentially useful approach is framed by Latour (1999), who describes the way in which human and nonhuman actants collectively create a social fabric in which each acquires properties of the other over time. This entwining of characteristics results in "an exchange of human and nonhuman properties" (p. 193), and the emergence of new actants as a collective. I argue that the modern organization takes on industrial age, machine-like characteristics manifest as bu...

One of my final courses in my doctoral program is a seminar on the Political Economy of Adult Education. We were asked to answer a series of questions that were the subject of a conversation between Ian Baptiste and Tom Heaney (1996). As people are sometimes interested in my own philosophy of education, I thought I'd post my reflections on the five Baptiste and Heaney questions, plus a bonus of sorts, reflecting on fundamental principles and precepts for rethinking public education in a ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate world.

Canadian Woman Studies, Vol 25, No 3-4 (2006). Home; About; Log In; Register; Search; Current; Archives. Home > Vol 25, No 3-4 (2006) > Federman. Font Size: Small Medium Large. The House on Lippincott. Mark Federman. Full Text: Subscribers Only.

The thesis support group can be an effective mechanism to enhance learning throughout the thesis journey. In this roundtable discussion, graduate students and a professor share their experiences as participants in a successful thesis group. The role of individual and team reflective practices is explored. Balancing the tension between content and process is also an essential element. Drawing on principles

Over the history of Western civilization, the dominant form of communications creates societal conditions that govern the form of society’s structuring institutions, including the shape and nature of organization. This paper traces the evolution of organizational models from the ecclesia and boule of Ancient Greece, through the Church in the Middle Ages, to Industrial Age and modernity. Organization in the 20th century is characterized by two parallel, but competing discourses represented by an extension of Industrial Age models in contrast with more contemporary, humanistic constructions. The paper concludes by proposing a new, foundational model for conceiving contemporary organizations consistent with a world that is now ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate.

Page 1. Surveillance & Society1(3): 375-398 http://www.surveillance-and-society.org © 2003 Surveillance & Society and the author(s). All rights reserved. ISSN: 1477-7487 PanopDecon: deconstructing, decontaminating, and decontextualizing panopticism in the postcyborg era. ...

Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board conducts some of its refugee hearings via videoconferencing. As part of a review of the fairness of this practice, a theoretical approach and review of the empirical literature was commissioned. Particularly under 'high stakes' ...

The creation of knowledge can no longer be restricted to the exclusive, privileged purview of universities and other officially sanctioned research institutes. As useful as it may be, evidentiary-based research is but one source of knowledge, reflecting only one way of ...

Page 1. Mark Federman 1 The Fifth Law of Media Barrington Nevitt and Maurice McLuhan ask, “Who was Marshall McLuhan?” ... In Page 2. The Fifth Law of Media Mark Federman 2 response, McLuhan wrote, “Those people who think that I am an enemy of the book have ...

Traditional view is that information seeking exists within the context of a particular discipline and is an iterative, but relatively linear process. The conceptual model of “taxonomy” (dating back to Plato) is a process of splitting, dividing and specificity. As we have begun to appreciate ...

In an age seemingly defined by near-ubiquitous access to Internet-based communication, there is little wonder that adult educators are turning to online, distance education as a means to reach their participants. In the traditional academy, post-secondary institutions increasingly ...

One of my final courses in my doctoral program is a seminar on the Political Economy of Adult Education. We were asked to answer a series of questions that were the subject of a conversation between Ian Baptiste and Tom Heaney (1996). As people are sometimes interested in my ...

"No Educator Left Behind" is the title of this lecture by Mark Federman. In it Federman contends that, as a result of the changes the internet has brought to the way students communicate and interact, universities, if they are to remain relevant, must move from the current model of education as skills centered to one that is more focused on connectivity.

I am an Adult Educator.
I am inspired by Eduard Lindeman’s admonition that “adult education is social education for social change.”
I believe that we each, individually and collectively, create meaning in a world that is subjective, contingent, complex, and contextualized by an ever-changing ground. Hence, I value the notion that there are multiple ways of perceiving phenomena, transforming these perceptions through our histories, cultures, and engagement with the phenomena themselves, and responding to environments, circumstances, subjects, and objects. These processes – perception, transformation, and response – according to Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, collectively comprise cognition. They do not, in the words of Fritjof Capra, represent “an independently existing world, but rather a continual bringing forth of a world through the process of living.”
Therefore, adhering to the credo that “education is what remains after you’ve forgotten everything you’ve been taught,” I incorporate five guiding principles into my teaching, whether situated as formal, informal, or non-formal learning.