Made in Canada. The Languages of the Media

This book explores the languages of the Canadian media from different interdisciplinary approaches. First of all, it wants to celebrate a long-lasting but often neglected liaison bringing Italy and Canada unexpectedly together. It is well known how, from the mid-1950s, the School of Toronto became the “invisible college” that introduced a new approach to the very idea of “media”, insisting on the humanistic roots of the term and suggesting a trans-disciplinary view of old and new forms of communication. However, it is seldom recalled that our current understanding of the term media was due to an experiment by Guglielmo Marconi, a young Italian, carried out in Canada as early as 1901. The essays here collected bring together ideas and observations from mainly Italian scholars working on the interplay of communication, literature, language studies, cultural memory, film and media studies to assess Canadian cultural and societal issues within old and new versions of the global village. Mobile and digital technologies have reconfigured the electric/electronic environment, bringing new opportunities as well as new challenges. Once again, society is changing fast, together with its people and its forms of expressions; once again, Canada offers an interesting scenario to explore short and long-term effects of such changes.