Much of what we have been reading for these first three weeks is related to what Vincent Casaregola, Professor of English at Saint Louis University and one of my former teachers, calls the OHM Thesis, which goes like this: “technologies of representation, communication, and mediation, when adopted widely in any cultural setting, and maintained over […]

In “Digitization Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of Writing and Today’s Computers”1 and The Medium Is the Massage, Walter J. Ong and Marshall McLuhan claim that literacy itself changes the way we think and perceive the world, in short, that literacy changes consciousness. While Walter Ong’s article is based upon the work of art historian Denise Schmandt-Besserat’s Before Writing […]

Earlier this week, I discussed the terms medium, media, and materiality and offered a few examples as to why considering issues of mediums, media, and materiality are important. In this lecture, I want to both expand on that earlier discussion and connect this issue more closely to this week’s readings by asking what at first […]