The Journal of Media Literacy – A McLuhan Mosaic Issue

Cherow O’Leary: “The metaphysics of Marshall Mcluhan: Technology, Ethics and Human purpose.”

McLuhan’s intellectual and spiritual roots (including Ellul) reveal how media reshape perception, culture, and ethics—and why human responsibility matters in the age of AI.

• What remains human when technology feels inevitable?

Association for Media Literacy: “Marshall McLuhan’s Big Ideas”

Carol Arcus and Neil Andersen offer an explanation of McLuhan’s big ideas with teaching ideas.

Johnson: “McLuhan Messaged Up My Mind”

McLuhan shifted the author’s view of media from delivery system to lived environment — shaping a lifelong commitment to storytelling, education, and meaning-making.

• What happens when theory becomes personal?

Farrell: “Contextualizing Marshall McLuhan”

Farrell reads McLuhan through a Catholic, analogical lens, where media are environments shaping perception and understanding.

• How did McLuhan’s life and beliefs shape his media theory?

Kowlessar:  “The Medium Matters More Than Ever”

McLuhan, Innis, and Hall ground critical media literacy, showing how media shape perception, meaning, and power.

• What does it mean to be critical when media construct the very reality we perceive?

Cali & Gustafson: “At the Digital Frontiers: Extending Media Literacy through Media Ecology.”

Media literacy must move beyond reading content to recognizing how media environments—especially in an AI-driven world—shape how we think, learn, and know.

• If media shape how we think, what must we change to think differently?

McDougall: “Media Literacy in the Ecosystem: After McLuhan.”

Media literacy is reimagined as an ecological, dynamic force for change within a complex communication ecosystem, beyond and after McLuhan.

• What does it take to build a just media ecosystem?

Martinisi: “Making the familiar strange again”: media effects, knowledge construction, and media literacy in the age of artificial intelligence.

In an AI-shaped media landscape, the imperative endures: from passive consumption to active, critical meaning-making.

• If AI shapes the conditions of knowing, how do we reclaim agency over what we know?

Mamikonyan, Gambino, Melgoza & Share: “Critical Media Literacy and the Importance of Critical Self-Reflexivity.”

Critical media literacy begins not with the text, but with the self—revealing how our identities shape meaning, power, and the possibilities for resistance.

• How do we question—and transform—the lens through which we make meaning?

Heriot: “The Message Is Multimodal: Acoustic Space, Disability, and the Present Future.”

Disability reveals that the future of media is already here—multimodal, distributed, and at the margins.

• Why are we still designing for the centre when the future is being built at the margins?

Kukiełko & Cywiński: “McLuhan’s Playground.”

A playful comic traces fashion from printing press to AI, revealing that we’ve always been programmed by our technologies—now with AI cheekily helping tell its own origin story.

• Who’s designing the outfit—us, or our technologies?

Redmond: “Talking with Fish: An Arts-based Retrospective of Media Literacy in Teacher Identity and Pedagogy.”

This reflective, arts-based journey explores teaching media literacy as swimming at the edges—where creativity, identity, and critical awareness help us understand the water we’re in.

• What does it mean to teach—and learn—when you’re swimming against invisible currents?

Moss: “McLuhan, Media Ecology, and Machine Learning: Rethinking Media Literacy in K–12 Education”

Media literacy is reimagined as an ecological classroom practice that empowers students to understand—and shape—the media environments that shape them.

• Why are we still teaching students to analyze media instead of making and challenging it?

Sinik:  “Media Literacy Education For Survival In An Algorithmic Age”

Media literacy is no longer optional—it is the core democratic skill for navigating algorithmic systems that shape what we see, think, and believe.

• What changes when critical thinking about media is embedded across the curriculum?

Timar: “Designing for Digital Wellbeing with Teens: Participatory Co-Design Workshops to Explore Youth-Centered Platform Concepts”

This study shows that the problem isn’t the users—it’s the platforms, and youth are ready to redesign them.

• What kind of digital world becomes possible when students are co-designers, not just consumers?

Marcello: “The Case of an AI Agent.“

An AI agent impersonating a student reveals not misconduct, but a deeper transformation of education in an automated media environment.

• Is cheating the problem—or an educational system that makes outsourcing possible?

Andersen (podcast): “GenAI Agent Imposters: A Cautionary Tale: A Podcast”. Neil Andersen interviews Gina Marcello.

• A conversation exploring a GenAI agent impersonating a student reveals a provocative question for education: what happens when participation—and learning itself—can be fully automated?

Andersen: “Wisdom Weavers by Tom Cooper: A Book Review By Neil Andersen

Exploring the intellectual “symphony” composed by Cooper to honor the legacies of Innis and McLuhan, this review interprets the work through the lens of AML’s key concepts.

• Are making connections through metaphors necessary for thinking in today’s world?

Cooper: “One Plus One Equals Three: A review of Dr. Paolo Granata’s Generative Knowledge.”

Reframing AI as a creative partner, where human + machine becomes more than the sum of its parts.

• What becomes possible when we stop competing with AI—and start thinking with it?

Comba & Toledo: “When the Algorithm is the Message: GenAI as Educational Environment”

Generative AI is not just a tool but a new media environment, reshaping how knowledge is produced, learned, and understood—and demanding a shift toward algorithmic literacy and agency in education.

• How might agency be nurtured in an algorithmically structured learning environment?

Gabai: “Hot Knowledge, Cool Action? Designing Digital Knowledge Platforms in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”

Knowledge platforms fail not from lack of information, but from design—functioning as “hot” systems that transmit rather than engage, and must be reimagined as participatory environments for action.

• How might we design platforms that turn knowledge into real-world change?

Reid: “The Imploded Hourglass”

A poetic meditation on time’s collapse in the digital age, tracing our shift from clock-bound urgency to an all-at-once, embodied presence.

• Are we “running out of time,” or stepping out of its shadow?