Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis and their followers have emphasized the materiality of media over its messages. Other historians explore the ways in which new technologies of communication and transportation transformed the human experience of space and time.
This talk takes a different approach to understanding the materiality of the medium. Transportation and communications companies needed wires, cables, pipes, towers, rails, roads, bridges, runways, and other built structures to transform the flow of peoples, goods, and information in Canada. We are used to thinking of those structures in terms of the large and ambitious communications networks of which they were a part. We are also used to thinking of them as monuments to the human capacity to transform the landscape, erasing topography, and distance.
In this talk, Ken Cruikshank will urge that we also take seriously the ways in which local human and non-human processes interacted with these structures and the new flows of people, goods and information, and incorporate those into our understanding of the development of a networked society. The talk will explore several luminous moments that illustrate both the fragility and resilience of local natural and human networks in the face of new communications and transportation systems. No matter how much they seemed to annihilate the bounds of time and space, those networks—yes, even cell phone networks—were grounded.
Grounded: Communications and the Nature of Canada
Ken Cruikshank, History, McMaster University
Room 130, Geography Building
February 29 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
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Mark Vessey has been invited to the University of Bristol to give the Blackwell-Bristol Lectures 2013 at the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition.
Dame Anne Salmond will give three talks on how different cultures define and communicate ways of being.
May 07, 2013The Global Civic Policy Society presents a Public Salon on Wednesday, June 5 from 7:30-9pm at the Vancouver Playhouse. A diverse range of speakers from very different walks of life will each spend 7 minutes speaking about something they are passionate about.- May 01, 2013Applicant Paul Yachnin (McGill University) and fifteen co-applicants including Green College Principal Mark Vessey received funding to begin their multi-disciplinary project entitled "Forms of conversion: religion, culture, and cognitive ecologies in early modern Europe and its worlds."
- April 26, 2013Green College resident Brittany Welsh describes how the daunting task of mounting four shows of Shakespeare's The Tempest helped and inspired her and her colleagues in ways she hadn't envisioned when she started down the Bard's path five months earlier.
January 04, 2013Seven Green College students volunteered at Lord Strathcona Elementary School in East Vancouver as part of UBC’s Community Learning Initiative TREK program, matching groups UBC students with elementary schools in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, and helping with reading and writing lessons and tutoring students on a one-on-one basis.
