The interdisciplinary seminar and magazine (Explorations) McLuhan and Carpenter ran at Toronto in the 1950s on a Ford grant — the first institutional try at McLuhan's "dialogue" idea, and one he came to judge a failure. It recurs as a cast of names (Tyrwhitt, Theall) and as a cautionary precedent. New to it — start with dialogue 03.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the 1952–56 Ford-grant venture — McLuhan and Carpenter, Theall as secretary — that McLuhan came to judge a failure
Cameron relays McLuhan's own 1956 verdict on the venture — a failure whose members stayed print-minded even as they studied the electronic, leaving him frustrated after three years.
"everybody in the Explorations Group had Gutenbergian minds"Marshall McLuhan, read by Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 3 (19 Nov 2020), 44:42
Peopled — Jacqueline Tyrwhitt as the medium carrying Giedion into the English-speaking world
Connections
McLuhan and Carpenter applied together for the Ford grant (1952–53), with Theall as secretary for the application.
Giedion's editor and translator, the member Bob calls the conduit carrying Giedion into English.
By 1956 McLuhan regarded the group as a failure — everyone in it, he thought, still had "Gutenbergian minds."
The New York inheritance set against the original Toronto one, and found wanting by both speakers.