academia – Page 2 – Liminal Wordsmith

September 9, 2025

McLuhan Meets Ulmer

While McLuhan and Ulmer never met in the physical sense, if you read them together it feels like they’re talking across time. Back in the 60s, McLuhan said, “the medium is the massage.” Years later Ulmer came along with his own idea, electracy, which is basically literacy for the digital age. Put those ideas next…

From Alley to Algorithm

On a brick-lined alley, next to Daisy, a corgi with more charm than Poe’s raven, I stumbled across this sign: ‘Poe-etry in the pocket.’ It struck me that literature is never just confined to books or screens. It leaks into alleys, into conversations, into the static hum of daily life. We write, we post, we…

Rhetoric of the Digital Age

Gregory Ulmer, an American media theorist and professor emeritus at the University of Florida, defines electracy as the digital-age counterpart to literacy. He coined the term electracy in the 1990s as an analogy to literacy, and his work focuses on rhetoric, literacy, and digital culture. In other words, literacy taught us how to communicate, think,…