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Explorations in Anonymous History: Toronto School Media Studies, 1951-1959

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Explorations in Anonymous History: Toronto School Media Studies, 1951-1959 excavates the collaborations and experiments that developed during the landmark interdisciplinary Culture and Communications Seminar held at the University of Toronto (1953-55). Funded by the Ford Foundation, the weekly seminar was organized by the then little-known English professor Marshall McLuhan and anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, along with urban planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, political economist Thomas Easterbrook, and psychologist D. Carleton Williams. Informed by studies of the bias of communication (Harold Innis, 1951) and the effects of mechanisation on culture (Sigfried Giedion, 1948), this group placed special emphasis on studying the effects of new media on oral and visual cultures, collaborating in part with the fledgling Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, whose first television broadcasts had aired in 1952. The group developed interdisciplinary methodologies using a "field approach” to discern the new "grammars" and environments created by electronic communications technologies (with an emphasis on film, television, radio and early computing). The project culminated in the journal “Explorations” (1953-59), a periodical of unusual intellectual diversity for its period, including anthropological studies of media effects, experimental poetry, scientific studies, and urban studies.
While McLuhan, the seminar's Chairman, rose quickly to international prominence, the contributions of the group's other members to media scholarship have been largely overlooked. Carpenter was the project's Co-Director, founded the “Explorations” journal and acted as its chief editor. His cultural anthropological studies of visual media and indigenous cultures contributed to the very shape that media studies would take during this period. Tyrwhitt acted as liaison with modernist architectural movements, providing vital links to members of Bauhaus and CIAM (International Congress for Modern Architecture). Easterbrook represented Innis' seminal studies of media biases in space and time. Williams introduced the group to contemporary psychological theories of perception. The participation and work of prominent to illustrious careers across the arts, humanities and sciences.

Contents of this path:

  1. Media as Extension and Environment
  2. BIOS

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