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Liss
Jeffrey
Liss
Jeffrey is a professor, producer, researcher, and speaker. She
holds degrees from Harvard/Radcliffe (AB, Social Relations), York (M.E.S.
Environmental Studies, Communications Media Analysis), and McGill (
PhD Communications) and teaches graduate seminars in New
media and policy, Communications
history, theory and technology, and Understanding
McLuhan and Media as an adjunct faculty member at the University
of Toronto. She is also the director of
the McLuhan
Global Research Network.
Dr
Jeffrey also founded and directs a new media and policy think tank
and production alliance, the byDesign
eLab . With her colleagues she has been engaged since 1997 in
creating a public space network using open source technologies to
advance community development, civic participation and cultural
content creation, through the national not for profit Electronic
Commons/ Agora Electronique, which was funded in part by HRDC's
Office of Learning Technologies, Community Learning Network. This
digital commons originated during the 1997-8 Visionary Speaker
series Canada byDesign:
Building a Knowledge Nation using new media and policy, which
was incubated at the McLuhan Program and produced by the eLab with
the New media and Policy seminar.
Dr
Jeffrey speaks, publishes and broadcasts locally and internationally
on the transformative effects of new media. Media literacy, fluency
and education have become fundamental to full participation in
democratic, cultural and economic life. Inspired by Marshall
McLuhan, she brings the perspective of Media Ecology and
Communications history to the understanding and old and new media
environments, and design of supportive policy and practices for a
knowledge network society. She has spoken extensively about Canada's
struggle to maintain a space for cultural diversity, public access
to new information technologies, and the need for a full spectrum of
civic literacies. She and her team test theories in practice at the
eLab and the eCommons.
Dr
Jeffrey researches and co-designs platforms, channels and
communities of practice to support citizen engagement in democratic
governance online. In 1998, the eLab and the McLuhan Program
designed and ran Canada's first online public consultation to form
part of the official federal public record, the New Media Forum/
Forum Nouveau Media, on hehalf of Canada's national media regulator,
the CRTC. With the Canadian Centre for Foreign Policy Development (CCFPD)
and its executive director Steve Lee, the byDesign eLab led a civil
society consortium (including the eCommons/agora) that built the
platform and moderated and hosted the online track for the
Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade eDialogue
with citizens on directions for Canada's foreign policy. The Foreign
Policy eDialogue won Canada's best of content category for
e-government in the national phase of the World Summit on the
Information Society awards, and was showcased at the Canada Pavilion
in Geneva in December 2003.
Dr
Jeffrey served as a Canadian expert on the Council of Europe's New
Information Technologies project, 1999- 2001, and contributed to the
Culture Committee's "Cultural policy for the new millennium:
public access and freedom of expression" initiative. She edited
and wrote several essays for the compliation Vital Links for a
Knowledge Culture: Public access to new information and
communications technologies (Council of Europe 2001), and as one of
the final experts, presented the results in Strasbourg. With the
permission of the Council of Europe, the eCommons/agora put the
Vital Links publication online in 2003, as a Canadian civil society
contribution to the WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society)
process. Dr Jeffrey was selected to serve as one of three civil
society members of the Canadian government official delegation to
WSIS Phase 1 in Geneva.
A
former television producer in the early days of CityTV, founding
producer of the Shulman File, and later freelance journalist, Dr
Jeffrey co-curated the original exhibition at the Royal Ontario
Museum, Watching TV, as acting director of the MZTV Museum of
Television 1995-96.
Dr
Jeffrey served as associate editor of the Canadian Journal of
Communications while doing doctoral work at McGill. At Trent
University she taught cultural studies, and worked on the Low Tech
MediaLab project. Her scholarly writing on Marshall McLuhan
(Jeffrey, Liss. 1989. "The heat and the light: Towards a
reassessment of the contribution of H. Marshall McLuhan"
Canadian Journal of Communication, 14(4-5), 1-29.) and on audiences
for Canada's cultural industries has appeared in the Canadian
Journal of Communications. She has also published on the private
television and cable industries, notably in The Cultural Industries
in Canada: Problems, policies and prospects (1996), edited by
Michael Dorland. (Jeffrey, Liss. (1996). "Private television
and cable" In M. Dorland (Ed.), (pp. 203-256). Toronto: James
Lorimer.) She researched and wrote the summary report on Women in
and Behind the Media: 1984 - 1994 for the Canadian delegation to the
Unesco conference of 1995, held in Beijing. Her essay, "The
impact of globalization and technological change on culture and
national identity: A call for visionary pragmatism" appeared in
The Culture/Trade Quandary: Canada's Policy Options (1998), edited
by Dennis Browne. "The impact of technological change on
Canada's affirmative policy model in the cultural industry and new
media sectors" (1999) appeared in the Canada-United States Law
Journal, published by Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
She
has published in popular and academic formats. Her essay,
"Reflections on the political process in an age of global
networks: Internet time and democracy's attention deficit
disorders" appeared in Italian (2003) “ Reflections on the
Internet's Democratic Potential: Media, culture and citizen
engagement in Canada's Foreign Policy eDialogue” presented in
Munich in 2003, is forthcoming.
She
is a member of the steering committee of the University of Toronto's
Knowledge Media Design Institute, and the advisory committee for
Historica.
Dr
Jeffrey has played many roles at the McLuhan Program, with which she
has been associated since the 1980s. A Connaught Fellowship grant
allowed her to develop the project "WoMedia: The presence of
feminism in the mass media environment." Later she developed
her projects "Symbolic Battleground: Politics of the Image in
the 1990s" and "Splices of Life." She has been an
adjunct faculty member since 1997 and was appointed Chief Knowledge
Media Scholar in 2004. Dr Jeffrey (with her team) incubated the eLab
and eCommons/agora projects at the McLuhan Program. Both are now
independent. She continues to direct the McLuhan global research
network. Further information can be found on the McLuhan
Global Research Network web site, which has been re-launched as
a platform for the emergent international network of researchers
inspired by the works of Marshall McLuhan.
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