In this conversation, Adam Pugen explores how new technologies amplify aspects of the human psyche, particularly focusing on the differences between auditory and visual cultures. He discusses how these sensory modalities shape our experiences and perceptions in distinct ways—and the need for media literacy, the changes between television and digital, the thinking of Marshall McLuhan, […]

If the difficult and polarizing aphorisms of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan might be appreciated, not as provocative and likely misleading pop cultural soundbites, as they were in the 1960s,1 but rather as foundational insights through which to understand, and act in, the present digital world, how might we begin to formulate the contemporary significance […]

It is fairly straightforward (and glum) to observe that our culture’s dependence on, and even reverence for, technological innovation has, in large part, led to the widespread displacement of the humanities by STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) in institutions of higher learning. Nevertheless, the perhaps unexpected ways in which our technological culture is implicated […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on propaganda’s causes, consequences, and cures. The advent of mass communication—beginning with the national newspaper but greatly accelerated first through radio and second, with great totalization, through television—ushered in a new paradigm for shaping the actions of human beings: propaganda.  It has been used to impose faux cultural homogeneity, to establish […]

While researching a variety of topics at conveniently-intersecting purposes, I came across this wonderful article from Elliot Gaines (author of 2011: Media Literacy and Semiotics), in which he explains how we need media criticism in order to avoid having our opinions settled for us by means contrary to reason in fact, even if many deem […]

The colloquium lecture delivered in November 2020 by Adam Pugen, PhD “How to be a Contemporary Thomist: The Case of Marshall McLuhan” is now available to the public. You can listen or download below (full lecture at the bottom). Please consider supporting the Lyceum Institute if you enjoy this lecture! The Lyceum Institute is currently […]

n the fifth of the Lyceum Institute Colloquia, we present our own Adam Pugen, PhD, who brings us a discussion of Marshall McLuhan--who, despite his popularity as a "media guru", was more fundamentally and consciously a Thomist...