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This article examines the collaborations between Marshall McLuhan, the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, and the modernist town planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt in the 1950s. Giedion's studies of everyday material culture and his concern with the human scale of cities became central to McLuhan's proposal for studying media. Through a historical analysis of Tyrwhitt's papers andcorrespondence, the paper documents her role in mediating a dialogue between McLuhan and Giedion and in co-founding, with McLuhan and others, the Explorations Group at the University of Toronto. Drawing upon Giedion's concern with the humanization of urban life, Tyrwhitt helped formulate a methodology that used the urban environment and architecture as the framework toanalyze the effects of media. The paper argues that Tyrwhitt's own contributions to the Explorations journal took up both Giedion and McLuhan's focus on media and material culture and their commitment to interdisciplinarity in examining the mediated experience of urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores privacy issues in relation to the growing prominence of marketing research and data mining in websites for children. Whereas increasing protection is given to individuals' personal information, little attention is paid to information that is aggregated, electronically scanned, and sorted --despite the fact that aggregate information is often highly valued by the marketing industry. The authors review current trends in Internet market research, data mining techniques, policy initiatives, and the contents of some of the most highly frequented children's game sites. The paper demonstrates how common data mining practices constitute a threat to children's emerging rights online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interaction between corporeality and information in the context of the digital interface is, as Anna Munster (2006) notes, characterized by the distinctly spatio-temporal processes of both "multiplication (doubling) and division (splitting)." In this experience, the body's "image, sensation, and action" mutate to align with the speeds of the informational universe, translating physical action into digital results and dividing attention between multiple spatio-temporalities. This paper considers such conjunctions and disjunctions within and through the applied media theory project Division Pixel Suppliers created at the University of Waterloo Critical Media Lab, focusing specifically on how embodied action in the digital interface of the arcade-cabinet installation is characterized by a fracturing of space and time that places interactants into a particular relationship with their technical environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toronto is experiencing a building boom, with eight major cultural construction projects in the works. These new monuments, part of what the City of Toronto calls its "Cultural Renaissance" are intended to bolster the city's reputation as an international economic and cultural capital. Albeit architecturally important, these buildings are better understood in the context of contemporary patterns of global economic competition and the changing role of culture in capitalist production. They also assert national identity and reflect a reorientation of Canadian cultural policy. This paper analyzes Toronto's "Cultural Renaissance" in light of changing cultural policies at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels, examining the role these new buildings will play in terms of promoting cultural tourism, city "branding," and nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A certain manner of framing totalizing critical takes on television has become common over the last few decades. It entails reference to the assumptions of cultural highbrows and of leftists contemptuous of mass popular culture. Such a framing is necessary but not sufficient. It fails to indicate the presence and significance of certain critical-popular responses to television viewing, responses related to how such viewing has figured within family circles and gender orders, and within histories of racial rule. This paper draws on representations in feminist fiction, on personal experience related to the ritual of "hockey night in Canada," and on Strikwerda and May's analysis of male friendship and intimacy to support the argument that we need to attend to critical-popular feminist takes on television rejection. They provide a way in to the consideration of issues which deserve further attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]