Focus and Scope
Taking its inspiration from the legacy of Marshall McLuhan and the Toronto School of Communication, MediaTropes is a transdisciplinary, peer-reviewed e-journal that seeks to breach boundaries, existing as a vigorous border hopper--alien in new cultural territories. It interrogates all frameworks, structures, and media, revealing the hidden ground of their effects. Included within this is not just a questioning of media themselves, but an examination of how information instantiated in media transforms and is transformed by their socio-cultural milieux.
A trope is a rhetorical figure; it is a turn, a turn of phrase, a manner of speaking. More generally, a trope is a mode of communication, the form that communication takes. As an e-journal, MediaTropes explores the ways that media of all kinds communicate, examining the hidden ground of mediated effects. McLuhan's famous aphorism, "the medium is the message," encourages us to examine what media do, not just what they say.
In this regard, all media, every technological extension of the human, are tropic. The metaphor, for instance, is literally a "carrying across," indicating movement and transformation. It is for this reason that McLuhan writes, "All words, in every language, are metaphors." Communication is not reducible to information exchange, but takes place in vital language that is irreducible to zeroes and ones.
MediaTropes invites the submission of new critical approaches, multimedia works, scholarly articles, and book reviews addressing the wide range of work that media theories have inspired. This includes, but is not limited to, disciplinary and transdisciplinary studies of:
* Marshall McLuhan and his legacy
* New media technologies
* Technoculture
* Art, technology, and machine aesthetics
* The posthuman
* Digitality and the virtual
* Cyberspace and cybercultures
* Television, Internet, and technopopular cultures
* Theories, rhetorics, and semiotics
* Literacies and post-literate cultures
* Communications studies, communications arts
* Media ecology
* Connectivity
* The social, political, and historical valences of media
* Codeworks, net.art, and web.art
* Activism and hacktivism
* Cosmopolitanism and globalism
Section Policies
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Editors- Michael Edmunds, University of Toronto McLuhan Program and Information Commons
 Open Submissions |
 Indexed |
Peer Reviewed |
Open Access Policy
As a complete work, MediaTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons by-nc-nd Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeWorks. When an author submits a work for publication, s/he is asked to agree to licensing that work under a similar license, that grants any user the non-exclusive right to download, print, copy, archive, distribute for non-commercial purposes only, so long as appropriate attribution is given to the author of the work. For more information, please read the details of the Creative Commons by-nc-nd license. While agreement to a Creative Commons (or similar) license is not mandatory for a work to be accepted, it is strongly encouraged by the editorial board.
Warranty and Indemnification
Authors represent (a) that the work submitted is an original work; (b) that the author(s) have the sole (and/or joint) right to submit the work for publication; (c) that the work does not infringe on copyright, trademark or patent; and (d) that the work does not invade the privacy, or any statutory or common law rights, of any person, or contains libellous material. The editors and reviewers are relying on these representations and are under no obligation to verify their validity. As such, the author(s) indemnify and hold the editors and reviewers harmless against any loss, liability, damage, cost or expense of action arising from any breach, or alleged breach, of these representations, or any legal action arising from acceptance and publication of the author(s) work. In the case that a legal action is brought by a plaintiff against an author(s), and/or the editors and/or reviewers, and/or any institution associated with MediaTropes, respecting a work submitted by the author(s) and published by MediaTropes, and the finding of a court of competent jurisdiction in such matter is in favour of the plaintiff, the sole remedy available from MediaTropes, its editors and reviewers will be the removal of the work in question from the MediaTropes website. All other damages awarded by the court (if any) will be the sole responsibility of the author(s).