His presentation begins with a quote: “Tell me a fact and I will learn. Tell me the truth and I will believe. Tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever”, and I was hooked.
I attende d a
Social Media Week event at The Spoke Club tonight. A friend of mine, photographer Nathaniel Anderson, made arrangements at my suggestion that it would be a timely and exciting talk. I had picked up a calender of Spoke Club events following a meeting Nathaniel and I had had two weeks ago. Bob Logan’s “Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan” had jumped from the February grid – this in my mind was a ‘can’t-miss event’. Bob Logan was a complete flop. This Professor Emeritus of Physics (U of T) and Chief Scientist of OCAD’s Strategic Innovation Lab was dry textbook verbiage personified. In between shameless plugs for his book, he shared sketchy anecdotes of the years he collaborated with the Marshall McLuhan on papers and such. The audience, comprised of students, Spoke Club members, invited guests, as well as McLuhan’s grandsons Andrew and Arthur, shared polite smiles and chuckles as Logan insisted on telling media-related jokes like this: “I am a McLuhan medium. I speak with him everyday”.
It didn’t take very long for me, Nathaniel and our mutual friend Mark Stoddart (who had also decided to join us for the McLuhan event) to make our way upstairs to a lounge area. This is where the fun really began. Mark Stoddart is a painter, graphic designer and all-round renaissance man. He happened to have with him a dvd presentation he had told me about a few weeks ago; a media literacy presentation for middle school students. During previous discussions with Mark, I learned that he had developed a talk around historic and contemporary symbols as well brand identities. As Mark walked Nathaniel and I through his presentation, I took notes and gazed, awestruck at some of the images and sophisticated concepts he’d managed to incorporate into his slideshow; everything from ancient African symbols of royalty to Pepsi’s slightly altered 2008 logo meant to resemble Obama’s campaign logo. Mark’s premise is that we all have a story (see above quote): Fortune 500 companies have a story, car manufacturers have story, pol
iticians, musicians, and graphic artists have stories and Mark sets out to tell his story using the images he’s found, co-opted and created over the years.
I don’t have the time or the permission to go into greater detail, but I can assure readers (particularly fellow teachers) that this presentation when refined and aligned with Ministry expectations will hold such relevance and meaning for our students who are not always equipped to uncover the stories behind the many complex media texts they encounter.
LT
