As the director of the Centre's New Media Unit, Hirsh ensures that each seminar hosts a variety of speakers that examine the current relationships between culture and technology. The big media and technology companies are trying to shove all this 'new media' down our throats without thinking of the societal implications. We seek to define the public interest. Hirsh, based in Toronto, has been involved with the McLuhan Culture and Technology Program for over two years. The apocalypse, if it exists, has been underway for some time now.
Many people call it the Internet.
As a society we're in the middle of a huge technological maelstrom, and quite frankly I don't see too many people or organizations analyzing this phenomenon from an engaging and democratic perspective. The seminars take an aggressive democratic approach to the exploration of new ideas and new technology, and we attempt to draw a strategy of social appropriation of the technological environment, so that whatever benefits exist will be able to be shared by all. Existing institutions like the universities, and especially the governments and corporations, are failing miserably in this regard. It seems that the 'establishment' has difficulty removing the 'self-interest' from the application and implementation of this technology. We embrace McLuhan's concept of anti-determinism which is the idea that if you can understand the social effects of the technology, you can then begin influencing your environment so as to defuse any form of determinism, whether political, technological, economic, or social.