2024.Jul.02

REPORTS

Report on Interactive Lecture by Dr. Paolo Granata “Playing with Marshall McLuhan’s ‘Laws of Media’”

Dr. Paolo Granata opened his talk with a lively introduction to the well-celebrated media scholar Marshall McLuhan’s colorful life at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto in Canada. Sparking the audience’s interest about the range of issues that we as humans have to tackle when interfacing with different media, Dr. Granata dove into the growing body of work he has done and continues to do through McLuhan’s media-oriented humanist scholarship. 

One of the inspiring examples from Dr. Granata’s talk was about a VR for education project that he started with his students during the COVID-19 pandemic when classes were all online. Dr. Granata showed snippets to the audience of a VR world inspired by McLuhan’s Coach House. Through this example, Dr. Granata exemplified the timeless importance of a co-present and creative format for student-to-teacher collaboration in learning. Just as McLuhan had done so in the past, Dr. Granata advocated for an engaged seminar format that involved learners as peers — a clear pedagogy that contributed to the development of the board game “The MediuM” which was the center of the day’s talk.

Dividing the room into teams, Dr. Granata explained the rules of “The MediuM” (See more at https://www.themedium.online/), a board game carefully made with his students in the Book and Media Studies Program at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. It was constituted of: a single dice labeled with the quadrants of the board, cards placed face-down at the center of the board with historic media technologies, four team pieces to move along the board, and finally, the board which was called a “tertrapad”, inspired by the key components of all media delineated in Marshall and Eric McLuhans’ book “Laws of Media” (University of Toronto Press, 1992). 

Each team volunteered a representative to play at the front of the room, and the representatives were each tasked to describe the mystery “media technology” they picked from the pile of cards. Representatives could only give hints to their respective teams depending on one of four “laws of media” in the tetrapad which the rolled dice fell on. A few rounds were played with high excitement in the room, making for a challenging but highly stimulating game of guessing what historic media technology was being described according to the quadrants on the tetrapad: “Enhance”, “Obsolesce”, “Retrieve” and “Flip”. Dr. Granata was the overseer, providing a walkthrough of the game rules in English (and Japanese), and giving hints to the first-time players on how to navigate the “Laws of Media” in a fun and interactive gamified format.

The interactive talk ended with very positive feedback from the participants, many of whom expressed eagerness to purchase the game for their own classrooms and personal use. The evening was closed with a reflective reception held after the event at the BAIROOM, congratulating Dr. Granata on a successful demonstration of “The MediuM”.