| June 7, 2012 12:00 am | to | June 10, 2012 12:00 am |
Times Square, at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue in New York City, has often been referred to as the “Crossroads of the World.”
In fact, New York City itself can be considered a crossroads of the world. New York Harbor is home to Ellis Island, the main point of entry for the “huddled masses” who came to the United States in search of a better life, particularly as part of the “great immigration” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and who became part of America’s great “melting pot.” The city’s five boroughs are home to the most diverse population of any city on earth, with virtually every culture and language group represented.
New York is also a crossroads of the media/mass media world: home to the U.S. corporate headquarters of almost all of our major multinational media conglomerates; home to Silicon Alley; and the indisputable news and information capital of the United States.
It must be added, too, that the way we understand, analyze, and make sense of our world and all things in it is through our human language, in its spoken, written, and print forms. That is to say, our world is all about words. And at this juncture in the history of human civilization, in which people speak of a “post-literate culture,” after media ecologist Walter Ong, S. J., subtitled his book Orality and Literacy “The Technologizing of the Word,” and media ecologist Jacques Ellul wrote The Humiliation of the Word, we can perhaps say that we stand at a “Crossroads of the Word.”
Convention Coordinator: Thom Gencarelli (thom.gencarelli{at}manhattan.edu).
