Bridging Past and Present to Build a Better Future

This issue, A McLuhan Mosaic: Bridging Foundational Thought to Present Urgency and Relevance, reflects the mission of the International Council for Media Literacy—to bridge academia to action.

We have to begin by thanking our guest editors, Neil Andersen and Carol Arcus, who worked closely with Andrew McLuhan and Antonio Lopez to shape this issue. As is our practice in developing an issue theme, we hosted conversations with our board, Advisory Council, and guests including Andrew McLuhan and Douglas Rushkoff who led us in reflecting on bridging the past with the present deeply and thoughtfully.  They, along with the authors who so generously contributed their thinking, have created a rich mosaic for us to explore. 

Over the past year, we have shaped this collection with a dual purpose: to look back and to steady ourselves. In revisiting the foundational theories, enduring questions, and decades of practice that define our field, we ask what must not be lost. At a time when our media and technological environment feels in constant flux, returning to these roots offers a necessary grounding amid rapid and often disorienting change.

This issue also responds to a pressing need for connection. Media literacy educators, scholars, and practitioners frequently work in isolation, separated by geography and discipline. Here, we aim to create space for shared reflection—to process the accelerating cultural and technological shifts shaping our work—and to offer not only analysis, but also a sense of collective purpose. In doing so, we hope this issue provides both clarity and renewal for those committed to building a more just and thoughtful media ecosystem.

Organized across themes of foundational grounding, contemporary relevance, environments, applications, pedagogy, and philosophy, the contributions in this issue grapple with urgent and generative questions. Here are just a few:

• What remains human when technology feels inevitable?
• If AI reshapes the conditions of knowing, how do we reclaim agency over what we know?
• How do we question—and transform—the lenses through which we make meaning?
• What does it mean to teach and learn within invisible yet powerful technological currents?
• What role do metaphor and connection play in thinking today?
• What changes when we stop competing with AI and begin thinking alongside it?

Taken together, these pieces do not offer a single answer. Instead, they form a mosaic—one that reflects both the complexity of our present moment and the enduring relevance of Marshall McLuhan’s insights. In bridging past and present, theory and practice, this issue invites us not only to reflect, but to act—with intention, with imagination, and with one another.