Call for Abstracts: Grabbe, Lars C., Andrew McLuhan, and Tobias Held. 2025. Marshall McLuhan: Then and Now. Büchner-Verlag: Marburg.

Deadline for abstracts: January 24, 2025
Deadline for articles: June 8, 2025

Marshall McLuhan was a pioneering media theorist that works on the effects of media and technology with a focus on perception, society, and culture. The well-known phrases “the medium is the message” and “global village” were influencing academia for a long time, because McLuhan was highlighting the nature of a medium itself as a form, rather than the content that it carries (cf. McLuhan 1964). For him the form is what influences society most deeply all around the globe and what forms the lifeworld in a global sense. McLuhan argued that a medium (e.g. print, television, or the internet) has specific effects on how people think, interact and communicate, thus shaping experiences and sociality in a profound way. His concept of the global village foresaw the world as interconnected through electronic media, leading to a collective consciousness that transcends – in drastic ways – individual cultures and geographical boundaries.

McLuhan explored how media act as extensions of the human senses, he examined the impact of the printing press on Western society, marking the transition from oral to written culture and the subsequent rise of individualism and rationality. He argued that the invention of the printing press led to the dominance of visual and linear thinking, which he believed was being challenged by the advent of electronic media that emphasize a return to more holistic and multi-sensory communication. McLuhan continued exploring the implications of media and technology until his death on December 31, 1980. Today, his work is still of high impact in the field of media ecology and social sciences and the editors of this volume want to address researchers from all around the globe that are using McLuhan-style methods, perspectives or theories for describing and analyzing the recent conditions of artificial intelligence in an accelerated electric post-modernity.

Topics could include the followings aspects but are not limited to:
1) The age of artificial intelligence and digitality in a McLuhan-style perspective.
2) Media and digital literacies in a mobile network society.
3) The influence of analog and digital art and design in the electric gadget society.
4) Knowledge management, creativity and problem-solving competences in a digitized
lifeworld
5) The (media-)politics of mind and body in the age of the internet

The different contributions can focus on the whole variety of McLuhan’s work to explore the range of media, culture, society and technology. The editors would like to invite authors from very different disciplines like media theory and ecology, educational theory, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, art and design, artistic research, image science, semiotics, phenomenology, art history, game studies, visual culture studies, computer graphics and other research areas related to the understanding of McLuhan’s work in the range of then and now.

The official deadline for abstracts is January 24, 2025. Long abstracts should have 500 to 700 words in length. Please send a short biography, contact details and your abstract to the editors Prof. Dr. Lars C. Grabbe, Andrew McLuhan and Dr. Tobias Held via: l.grabbefh-muenster.de.

The official deadline for the completed articles is June 8, 2025. The articles should be 5.000 to 6.000 words in length. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the managing editors via mail.

References:
McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.