How do media cultures, technologies and events lend shape to the informational time and space of the late modern world? What will be the new rules for public communication in the coming decades and how will these new rules play out with respect to the design and support of communities of practice, for the circulation of information and access to the production of knowledge and expression?

Dealing with these questions means grappling with how the conditions of mediacy play out within the context of historical change. Following the lead of the Canadian school of communications/media, getting at the mediated features of knowledge and expression requires seeing every age as an information age and taking successive forms of new media as screens or frameworks for working through conceptually the temporal and spatial dynamics of the material culture that precede them. In this way media history can be seen as making a useful contribution to the growing thematic of contemporary practice theory and for which a robust theorizing of its communicational or mediated features remains central.

Professor Crowley was for many years on the faculty of McGill University, from which he recently took an earlier than anticipated but otherwise voluntary retirement. He has worked as a journalist, editor, video documentarist, and consultant. He is currently a principal with the Ottawa based InterNet Consulting Group, with which he has been associated since 1992 as research director.

Academic Career

David can probably claim to have been instrumental in establishing the first graduate program in Communication Studies in Canada at McGill, although not as a founding member. He was awarded arguably the first Ph.D. in communications in Canada and subsequently served on the faculty and as Director of the Graduate Program in Communications at McGill. His seminars on Communication Theory and History/Theory/Technology anchored the graduate studies curriculum at McGill for what seemed a very long time. He has been visiting and associate faculty at the University of Toronto and was a Department of Foreign Affairs visiting scholar in Australia. David has supervised forty theses and dissertations, in communications, cultural studies, history and technology studies. His own work and indirectly that of his students has received support from many sources, including the Canada Council, the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, the International Institute of Communication, SSHRC, NCE Centres of Excellence, CIDA, and CANARIE, in addition to several federal Ministries. He has published scholarly articles, monographs, commissioned reports and edited collections, mostly on the thematics of communication and media. His co-authored and edited textbook, Communication in History -- technology, culture, society (Pearson, 2010) is now in its sixth (and likely final) international edition.

Academic Background

David studied history at Johns Hopkins University, where his supervisor, the economic historian Alfred D. Chandler, steered him toward the deep history of institutions and lead him to initially think about their basis in information practices. While an undergraduate, Richard Macksey encouraged his participation in the Graduate Writing Seminars and provided an introduction to narrativity, symbolic agency and the poststrucuralist beginnings of the linguistic turn in the human sciences. David's Masters degree is from the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania, where he broadened his interest in media and the need to theorize the communicational conditions of the social world. At Annenberg, Bob Scholte introduced him to reflexive sociology and critical theory and later provided an entre to study with Jurgen Habermas. Klaus Krippendorff spurred an engagement with social cybernetics that culminated in work on and with Gregory Bateson. After periods in Europe, David returned to Canada to do a dissertation on communication theory, exploring the tensions between the critical and the cybernetic, under the supervision of Donald Theall, who in turn would encourage his longstanding interest in the Toronto or Canadian school of communication. As part of that later interest, David has researched, published and presented on Harold Innis's communications history over several decades. Harold Innis also plays a significant role among others in his newest and most stubbornly unpublished manuscript, The Age of Affordance. Taken together, these themes converge on the need, if not necessity, to place a theoretical understanding of mediated communication at the core of contemporary practice theory.

Policy and New Media Research

As an independent researcher and consultant David has worked on policy initiatives and planning. He was a research analyst for Citizens Forum and a Canadian participant in the International Institute of Communication Right to Communicate project. HIs participation in internet research in Canada, include grants from the NCE Centre of Excellence on TeleLearning, the Information Deficit Project of Heritage Canada, the Center for Learning Technologies, the Stanford Research Institute, the National Film Board of Canada, the Metropolis Project, and CANARIE among others. He is currently part of a working group on knowledge mobility and education in the new information environment.

David spent the better part of a decade working in the Canadian north, mainly with the Inuit on development of indigenous community media, including work with the Village Video Network and Taqramiut Nippingat, putting in place the constituents of regional television and radio networks. He subsequently served as on-going consultant to Inuit and Cree. The Secretary of State supported several years of field research and subsequent meta-analysis which forms a baseline ethnography and ecology of media use for the region. He received a Gannett Foundation grant in recognition of his work in the North.

David Crowley resides at the wondrous top of the Frontenac Arch, in Frontenac County, eastern Ontario.