Open AccessMcLuhan Meets Convergence Culture: Towards a New Multimodal Discourse
Author(s) -
Suzanne de Castell,
Milena Droumeva
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
media tropes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1913-6005
DOI - 10.33137/mt.v8i1.38291
Subject(s) - multimodality , conceptualization , technological convergence , convergence (economics) , rhetoric , digital media , sociology , new media , semiotics , media theory , literacy , epistemology , media studies , cognitive science , aesthetics , computer science , linguistics , psychology , art , political science , telecommunications , philosophy , artificial intelligence , pedagogy , law , economics , economic growth
Drawing principally on public performances in lectures, interviews, and staged presentations, rather than on published texts, this paper discusses McLuhan’s still overlooked contribution to media studies, including a conceptualization of multimodality that defies the logics of literacy, and refutes and refuses its barriers and boundaries. Seen here as a road not taken, McLuhan’s understanding of media, in the form of a transitional theory of media convergence, was an opportunity lost to understand, and to intentionally cultivate, our experience of multimodality, not as a media multiplication, addition, or enhancement, but with the proto-acoustic ‘all-at-once-ness’ of multisensorial convergence. The cost of that lost opportunity for media studies, we argue, has been a conception of multimodality in particular, and media convergence in general, as a ‘multiplication’ driven principally by the characters, capabilities, and economies of digital technologies, not the still vastly untapped sensory and cognitive capabilities of human beings.