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The Thirteenth Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association
The Crossroads of the Word
June 7–10, 2012
Manhattan College
Riverdale, New York
Times
Square, at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue in New York
City, has often been referred to as the “Crossroads of the World.”
In fact, New York City itself can be considered a crossroads of the
world. New York Harbor is home to Ellis Island, the main point of
entry for the “huddled masses” who came to the United States in search
of a better life, particularly as part of the “great immigration” of
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and who became part of
America’s great “melting pot.” The city’s five boroughs are home
to the most diverse population of any city on earth, with virtually
every culture and language group represented.
New York is also a crossroads of the media/mass media world: home to
the U.S. corporate headquarters of almost all of our major
multinational media conglomerates; home to Silicon Alley; and the
indisputable news and information capital of the United States.
It
must be added, too, that the way we understand, analyze, and make
sense of our world and all things in it is through our human language,
in its spoken, written, and print forms. That is to say, our
world is all about words. And at this juncture in the history of
human civilization, in which people speak of a “post-literate
culture,” after media ecologist Walter Ong, S. J., subtitled his
book Orality and
Literacy “The Technologizing of the Word,” and media ecologist Jacques
Ellul wrote The Humiliation of the Word, we can perhaps say that we
stand at a “Crossroads of the Word.”
Convention Coordinator: Thom Gencarelli (thom.gencarelli{at}manhattan.edu).
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