Dewey's Cosmic Traffic: Politics and Pedagogy as Communication

[slideshare id=12240322&doc=deweyscosmictraffic-120401024713-phpapp02]
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This is a set of slides and audio recording from the Media Transatlantic IV Conference in Paderborn. (Richard Cavell and I hosted Media Transatlantic III at UBC in 2010). (Apologies for the less than perfect audio.)

Here’s a draft version of the paper and below, an extended abstract:

Given the appearance and reappearance of this notion of transaction, interaction and communication across his writings, Dewey can be said to be an important and early contributor to discourses on “traffic” as an event and as a medium. His wide-ranging and gradually evolving thought offers an opportunity to see how various issues can be configured in terms of dynamic flow and circulation. These issues include the development of technical media that were profoundly reshaping nearly all aspects of everyday reality in Dewey’s time. Among these technical media are the railway and telephone, as well as the mass media of radio, film, newspaper and other print forms. As one would expect, Dewey frequently portrayed these as facilitating ever an ever-widening gyre in a larger, generative economy or medium.

At the same time though, Dewey was forced to address far-reaching critiques of communication in the political arena, which saw new media as distorting and blocking effective communication. In this presentation, I focus on Dewey’s remarks on media and circulation in both his 1927 book, The Public and its Problems, and in two early works, “The Primary-Education Fetich [sic]” and “Lectures vs. Recitations: A Symposium.” As McLuhan perceptively noted, “Dewey” was in effect “reacting against passive print culture [and thus] surf boarding along on the new electronic wave.” Through this examination, I show how Dewey is indeed, and perhaps unwittingly, riding along an electronic wave that was just beginning to well up in the first half of the twentieth century.

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