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David Gallagher (January 29) reviews Borges and Me, my recent book about my travels with Jorge Luis Borges in 1971. Like Maria Kodama, the widow of Borges, Gallagher doubts that [...]

ONE OF THE CONSTANTS OF MCLUHAN CRITICISM AND BIOGRAPHY IS THAT his training as a scholar of Renaissance English literature and its debt to the rhetorical tradition, coupled with his [...]

McLuhan's anomalous position within communication theory can be credited to the fact that he was developing a spatial model of communication. Unlike traditional models which focused on the transmission of a message, McLuhan's model was concerned with the transformations in the relationship between message and context. Based on the notion of acoustic space, McLuhan's notion of spatial communication was processual, dynamic, and relational. He arrived at his theory through his reading of Canadian economic historian Harold Adams Innis, who had developed the notion that communication media exhibit biases toward space or time. McLuhan sought to address the spatial bias of contemporary communication systems by theorizing that electronic media were producing a dynamic space whose paradigm was the auditory (or acoustic) and which was counterposed to visual space. Any communication thus represented a relationship between what was communicated and the context in which it was communicated. Given that electronic media allowed for instant communication, communication took on an iconic quality, with communication taking place all at once, spatially, rather than in a linear fashion. By theorizing the context of communication, McLuhan was able to develop a theory of communication sensitive to the social and material emplotments of communications. The spatial bias of McLuhan's theory of communication has much in common with that of postmodernism, which provides a productive matrix for further research into McLuhan's theory of spatial communication.

I. In 1854 Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden of a visit paid him by a wandering French-Canadian woodchopper. So taken was Thoreau with this rugged laborer--'a true Homeric or [...]

I. In 1854 Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden of a visit paid him by a wandering French-Canadian woodchopper. So taken was Thoreau with this rugged laborer--'a true Homeric or [...]

The article analyses the influence of the philosophical problem of determinism as discussed at Cambridge University in the 1930s on the media theories of Marshall McLuhan and Alan Turing. It is argued that the problem of indeterminacy of observation raised by physicists and mathematicians substantially influenced McLuhan's contrastive analysis of visual space and the auditory domain. A further crucial concept bridging between physics and media theory is the notion of 'interface' used in the contexts of thermodynamics as well as telegraph engineering, which as a site of indeterminacy becomes the central category of the Turing Test and of other important domains of Turing's thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the journal including one on utopian themes in contemporary advertising by Shane Gunster and another on cultural studies by Sourayan Mookerjea.

Examines the impact of the increasing hegemony of electronic mediation on the relationship between space and text reflected in the novel "The English Patient," by Michael Ondaatje. Implications of the notion that the language of space has assumed an important place in literary and cultural studies as depicted in the novel; Parts of the novel that signal the collision of its various spaces; Significant problems posed by the displacement of surfaces in the concluding section of the novel.

The article discusses the history of the book "Understanding Media" by Marshall McLuhan, focusing on its influences, publication, and critical reception. It notes that the book, released in 1964, developed from McLuhan's "Report on Project in Understanding New Media" and changed as media did. The legacy of the book is also examined it terms of its effects on media studies.

A doctor who is treating a patient in an Australian hospital may make a pre-emptive decision not to attempt to resuscitate that patient in the event of the patient's sudden demise. This decision is commonly referred to as a not-for-resuscitation (NFR) order. This article examines what resuscitation is, and what it means to withhold attempts at resuscitation from a patient. The medical, legal and ethical doctrines relating to death and dying are synthesised into a set of robust guidelines for making NFR decisions.

Quality assurance techniques aim to measure and uphold the quality of patient care. Tools have been developed that investigate bad outcomes, and identify system errors that may lead to bad outcomes. Hospital administrators are motivated to use these tools, but worry that quality assurance may itself cause legal risks to a hospital. For example, if a hospital finds and documents substandard care, a patient who has suffered a bad outcome might discover this and try to use it in litigation against the hospital. This article examines the legal doctrine behind document discovery, freedom of information, legal professional privilege, medical professional privilege, qualified privilege and defamation, to explore how patients and their relatives may, first, come across and obtain quality assurance findings, and second, use them in legal action. With this knowledge, public hospital administrators might then be able to engage in quality assurance without unduly causing legal risk for their hospital.

The medical profession is in the habit of using a standard "consent form" to record a patient's consent to medical therapy, particularly for a surgical operation. This article explores how to design a consent form to avoid the many traps to be found in the law of consent.