Robert K. Logan

Robert K. Logan (born August 31, 1939), originally trained as a physicist, is a media ecologist. He received a BS and PhD from MIT in 1961 and 1965, respectively. After two post-doctoral appointments as a Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1965-7) and the University of Toronto (1967-8), he became a physics professor in 1968 at Toronto until his retirement in 2005. He is now professor emeritus.^[1] In

While active at the University of Toronto, in addition to math-based physics courses he taught an interdisciplinary course – "The Poetry of Physics" – which led to his collaboration with Marshall McLuhan, and his research in media ecology and the evolution of language. His best known works are The Alphabet Effect – based on a paper Logan co-authored with McLuhan – which develops the hypothesis that the alphabet, codified law, monotheism, abstract science and deductive logic form an autocatalytic set of ideas that developed uniquely between 2000 BC and 500 BC between the Tigris-Euphrates river system and the Aegean Sea; The Sixth Language: Learning a Living in the Internet Age which deals with the hypothesis that speech, writing, math, science, computing and the Internet form an evolutionary chain of languages; The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind and Culture develops a model for the origin of language, the human mind and culture using ideas from The Sixth Language.

Logan has also been the Chief Scientist of the Strategic Innovations Lab at OCAD University in Ontario since 2007, and a senior fellow at the university's Beal Institute.^[2] Part of his work at OCAD involved a language-based project to change popular attitudes about the environment, which resulted in the coining of the word "depletist".

In September 2010, Logan founded the McLuhan Legacy Network, a non-profit organization based in Toronto dedicated to renewing the legacy of Marshall McLuhan and celebrating the centenary of McLuhan's birth in 2011.^[3]

Books and articles

• (ed.) The Way Ahead for Canada. (1977) Lester and Orpen.
• with Steven.D. Berkowitz (eds.) Canada’s Third Option. (1978) MacMillan Canada.
• The Fifth Language: Learning a Living in the Computer Age. (1997) Stoddart Publishing.
• with Louis W. Stokes. Collaborate to Compete: Driving Profitability in the Knowledge Economy (2004) John Wiley (Mandarin Edition ISBN 7-5080-3669-7).
• The Alphabet Effect. (2004) Hampton Press. ISBN 1-57273-522-8
• The Sixth Language. (2004) Blackburn Press. ISBN 1-930665-99-7
• "The Extended Mind Model of the Origin of Language and Culture" in Gontier, Nathalie; Van Bendegem, Jean Paul; and Aerts, Diederik (eds.) Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture. (2005) Springer.
• The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind and Culture. (2007) University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-9303-5
• Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan. (2010) Peter Lang Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4331-1126-6
• The Poetry of Physics and the Physics of Poetry. (2010) World Scientific Publishing. ISBN 981-4295-93-0

Awards and honors

The Sixth Language won the Suzanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form in 2000 from the Media Ecology Association,^[4] and in June 2011 Logan received the Walter J. Ong Award for Career Achievement in Scholarship from the same Association.^[5]

References

Notes

External links

• Official website
• Robert K. Logan, interview with Figure/Ground Communication