he bright orange iPhone looks out of place in this ramshackle building on the edge of UofT’s St.George campus.But today’s new gadget is profoundly linked to this old place called The Coach House.Here’s where four and a half decades earlier,a philosopher named Marshall McLuhan theorized on media,technology and communication,coined some of the 20th century’s most quoted phrases—the medium is the message and the global village—predicted the Internet,and foresaw the concept of YouTube and Wikipedia. Given that McLuhan’s prophecies on the digital revolution began at UofT,it’s fitting that his legacy is reflected today through a network of scholars from across the disciplines,who are,individually and collectively,shaking up conventional wisdom and technologies,producing dynamic new work that is changing all our lives.
McLuhan 101
That iPhone belongs to Derrick de Kerckhove,French professor and director of UofT’s McLuhan Centre from1983 to 2008.He worked with McLuhan for more than a decade as a translator,assistant and co-author and helps run The McLuhan Program,which encourages understanding of the impact of technology on culture and society from theoretical and practical perspectives,thereby continuing McLuhan’s work.
Between calls,e-mails and texts to colleagues in Italy,France and the room downstairs,de Kerckhove says today’s digital era,which McLuhan predicted with “stunning accuracy,”represents a fundamental cognitive change for people and the way they communicate.“By reading a book,I silence language. I’m processing what I’m reading inside my brain.But if I am at a computer looking at the screen and playing with my keyboard,there is an interaction. There’s a reversal of the axis of cognition with the screen.This is what happens in the digital era.”de Kerckhove says that McLuhan called this a third great phase of communication,the first phase being oral,the second literate.“Today,all three phases co-exist—we can still talk,write,read,but once we incorporate the electronic medium,the language between each of us changes.”As he explains,today a book is read and then a review may be put up on a Facebook site. A reading may appear on YouTube,an excerpt on MySpace. Suddenly,de Kerckhove says,language has been externalized.It’s totally different than language on paper.“People have changed their way of representing themselves.”
Digital media—defined
In this electronic age we live in,where communication by electronic form is verging on ubiquity,digital media is difficult to define. Eugene Fiume,former Chair of Computer Science and Co-Director of UofT’s Dynamic Graphic Project (dgp),agrees.“Digital media is as amorphous as you think.It’s any electronic representation of a communication—it’s any message that’s electronic,from your cell phone activity,your power point slides,word processing documents,text messages,e-mails.It’s an electronic representation of content of various sources.”In short,digital media is really about an entire ecosystem—from the content itself,the electronic representation,to the way it’s manipulated,stored,how meaning is extracted from it,how content is created and the problems that create the content. Fiume adds,“Digital media is all of these things—it’s potentially emancipating and constricting all at the same time.”
The consumption and dissemination of digital media is a phenomenon unto itself. YouTube,which allows anyone to both consume (by watching) and disseminate (by posting) content of all kinds,is an incredible study in digitalmedia.It was designed to move people away from having to worry about how content is rep-resented to how it is used.In fact,the reason for YouTube’s success is its very usability.One click uploads your video. Another allows you to embed a pointer to a video in an e-mail message or blog,and so on. YouTube’s success has also generated a wave of new ideas about how products are developed and marketed. Viral marketing,for example,today relies on digital media and the quick reaction that one gets from it.And one just needs to look at the success of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign to be convinced of the pivotal role digital media can have on managing issues,voter turnout,campaign momentum and fundraising.
In terms of research,digital media provides possibly the perfect storm of interdisciplinary scholarship.At UofT,there are over 100 lead investigative teams working in the areas of digital media technologies or multimedia,culture,and entertainment,imaging and diagnostics,e-health applications,digital learning,social innovation,high performance computing and more.
The social scientists are interested in looking at how some classic research problems are being changed by the propagation of digital media.The engineering scholars are examining the “plumbing”for digital media—coding and storing media,increasing battery power for mobile devices and constructing digital media tools that require low battery power. Anthropologists are interested in how we behave in these new communities created in the digital age. Economists are wondering about the new economies and models of purchasing and consumption digital media creates. Political scientists are intrigued with the effect digital media has on communicating issues widely,democracy and even human rights and the Inter-net as a public space.Then there are the computer scientists,who take a particular form of digital media and get interested in some scientific aspect of it.
UofT’s digital media mavericks
The animators & the gamers
Fiume is immersed in the world of digital representations,computer graphics that focus on realism—under-standing what makes something convincing.“We’re a bit obsessed with not only the mathematical and physical aspects of how realistic computer graphics are done and also how effective they are—the neuroscientific and psycho-social aspects of graphics,”he says.“What is it that makes something convincing?”The research involves first making mathematically physically plausible models,taking whatever they can from biology and physics and representing them into a numerical approximation that can be done on a computer. Fiume and his colleagues have a long history of creating algorithms for realistic animation—fire,smoke,hair,physically correct light sources—in the dgp.In fact,some early scientific work in the dgp on the visual modelling of natural phenomena such as clouds,water,smoke and fire was licensed and transferred to industrial computer graphics software that has been used in virtually every film production since that has required special effects.
The computation time required for physically realistic graphics is very high.Real-time graphics for gaming technology requires the computation of a new image every one-thirtieth of a second,and as such may require visually plausible short-cuts.“So we’ve got those of us who are purists who want to do as effective as possible a job in capturing the mathematical relationship in computer graphics versus the people who need to make them go really quickly.And they’re going to take advantage and going to work backwards from the specific capabilities of the computer,”says Fiume.“It’s a little like engineering the rest of the car to achieve a certain speed once you’ve already got your engine.”
The social innovators
New media’s ability to boost democracy in the digital era is a phenomenon,and nowhere has that been more apparent than at UofT’s Munk Centre for International Studies where political scientist Ron Deibert directs The Citizen Lab—a research centre focusing on the intersection of digital media and variations of world and civic politics,human rights and global security. Deibert and a team of students research and develop technology that explores the political dimensions of digital media,especially in an international context.“From the beginning,my aim was to create a hot-house environment where I could bring together computer scientists,engineers,graphic designers and others to work on common projects under my direction,”he says. Together with collaborators around the world,Deibert has developed a global counter-intelligence operation,run through civic networks,that’s university-based,oriented toward unearthing,documenting,monitoring and reporting on breaches of human rights online in the digital media environment.His circumvention software,psiphon,operates using social networks of trust. Users in uncensored locations install psiphon on their computers and give the connection information to family or friends in censored locations,allowing them to surf the Internet through the computer in the un-censored location. Built upon the software application is psiphon inc.,spun out of the Citizen Lab (with assistance from U ofT’s Innovations Group) to provide circumvention services to clients who are interested in knowing what web content of theirs may be filtered.“
We see ourselves very much as,in part,a due diligence organization,actively tracking and monitoring how various individuals are exercising their power in the world digital media environment and we want to make sure that they are doing things the way that the are saying they’re doing,in a way that doesn’t violate human rights.”
Toronto and UofT—digital destination
When McLuhan talked about the global village,he envisioned “electronic mass media collapsing space and time barriers in human communication”—the globe turned into a village by the electronic mass media.But Richard Florida,director of UofT’s Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management,has a slightly different take.He believes that while technology has indeed made the world smaller in many ways,urban,physical places have a major role to play in the technological revolution—because it’s in these hubs that the creativity needed to drive innovation,such as digital media research,resides.“
Ever since the new media emerged,experts have said it will make place less and less important. Nothing can be further from the truth,”he says.“In fact,new media is occur-ring in real places from Silicon Valley in California and New York’s Silicon Alley to Helsinki and Tokyo.”And,he adds,Toronto is poised to join the ranks of the world's leading new media hubs with great research,great technology,world-class media and thriving music,film and artisticscenes.What gives Toronto the potential to be a leader in digital media research is largely fuelled by research at UofT. There is not only a volume of work going on,but expertise and access,through connections to the hospital system,the financial system,and the arts community. Paul Young,U of T's Vice-President,Research,agrees and stresses the importance of expanding collaborative work in new media."We're very open to collaboration and we're actively building private sector and institutional partnerships."
Seamus Ross,the new dean of UofT’s Faculty of Information is astonished by the richness of the digital media initiatives in Toronto and at UofT:“Everything from the technology side to the arts and culture to traditional forms of digital media applications such as cataloguing and databases—it’s stunning,”says Ross,who comes to UofT from the University of Glasgow and whose own research interest is the documentation and management of digital materials so that they’re accessible and usable for the long term. Where is digital media going?As Derrick de Kerckhove reminds us,McLuhan said our technologies are way ahead of our thinking. Fiume says that as social beings,digital media will continue to allow us to define the relation-ships we want with people. Deibert’s hope is that we can enjoy the benefits of digital media such as the Internet,in a free and open,uncensored manner. Ross believes it will continue to define and challenge the role of libraries,cataloguing and preservation. Florida predicts it will continue to define innovation and breed creativity. Wherever digital media is headed,UofT scholars are,like McLuhan before them,asking the questions and providing many answers to what lies ahead in the digital age.
