Old New Media

Paul Grosswiler is the author of Method is the Message: Rethinking McLuhan through Critical Theory (1998) and editor of Transforming McLuhan: Cultural, Critical and Postmodern Perspectives (Peter Lang, 2010), as well as more than 35 scholarly articles and book chapters. He is a professor in the department of communication and journalism at the University of Maine, where he teaches media ecology, media ethics, international mass communication and mass communication history. He was a communication and journalism Fulbright scholar at Wuhan University in China in 2000. He also is the editor of the journal Explorations in Media Ecology. He earned a PhD in journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and worked as a journalist in Missouri and Maine.

«Highlighting that communication methods alter human thought and societal structures, this book exemplifies superb scholarship of value well beyond the media ecology field. Warning that myopic responses of 'technological horror' and 'technological sublime' obscure new media's impact, Grosswiler deconstructs assumptions, assesses the historical narrative about media, explores East-West predispositions, and expli-cates numerous thinkers' work. With matchless skill, he crystallizes core and shifting thought - like that of James W. Carey and Jacques Ellul. Astonishing breadth and depth mark these twenty-three chapters, including «book-enders» that foreground insights about Socrates' criticism of writing.» (Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Professor Emerita, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota Author of Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America)
«Grosswiler is a brilliant and daring scholar whose work challenges conventional wisdom and significantly advances our understanding of media and culture. His writing and thinking are crystal-clear. In short and highly readable chapters, Old New Media grapples with a wide range of topics that challenge accepted perspectives in playful, provocative, and persuasive ways. His work is historically grounded and philosophically rich. Grosswiler clearly delights in the demanding task of advancing the 'great conversation' by creating new paradigms of understanding or vastly modifying pre-existing models.» (Joshua Meyrowitz, Professor and Chair, Department of Communication, University of New Hamp-shire, Author of No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior)
«Old New Media contributes to reassessing the enduring significance of McLuhan's work within the tradition of media ecology, to mapping the common ground between media ecology and social ecology, and to the 'poetics' of what we in Canada would call transformation theory - the Innis/McLuhan et al claim that new media transform