Article:

Zwischen Sprache/n. Explorationen der Medien zwischen Kultur und Kommunikation 1954

The Canadian journal EXPLORATIONS. STUDIES IN CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION (1953–1957) can be considered as founding document of nowaday᾿s media studies. The essay discusses historical and epistemological prerequisites of its third issue (of August 1954). This issue includes Edmund Carpenter᾿s early considerations about differences of media, contributions of scholars from the emerging field of metalinguistics, exegesis of Harold Innis᾿ writings on communications, report on and analysis of a media experiment as well as a text by Marshall McLuhan dealing with poetry as a field of communications. All of these essays refer to a then notorious research paradigm from linguistic anthropology associated with the name of Benjamin Lee Whorf. It states that differences between cultures are differences between languages and between the means of communication.