Tomorrow's class

Hello everyone

As the result of a recent and rather remarkable series of lucky events, I am going to change our course lecture schedule. Tomorrow, I am pleased to announce that Ms. Nora Bateson will come to our class and screen her film "An Ecology of Mind," a film that had its debut in the Vancouver Film Festival this past weekend. In fact, owing to certain legal considerations, I was not in a position to announce that Nora would be coming to our class until this morning.

The film is an intellectual biography of Nora's father, Gregory Bateson, one of the most important communication theorists of the 20th century. Although we haven't discussed Bateson directly in our course thus far, his work was extremely important in the development of the systems theory I discussed when I mentioned the work of Paul Watzlawick two weeks ago (Bateson and Watzlawick were colleagues at one time). In other words, some of Bateson's work will already be familiar to you though admittedly we have only touched on the main themes in his work.

The film is approximately one hour. After introducing Nora she will screen the film and then answer your questions. Please try to come up with a few good questions about Bateson's work to ask her as you watch the film! She is scheduled to leave for Europe shortly to show the film at several other film festivals so it is especially generous of her to agree to come to an SFU undergraduate course to show the film here.

I am not going to assign additional reading for tomorrow's film, but you might want to at least look at the Wikipedia entry on Bateson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson. Of course, you can find other online sources about Bateson should you wish to do additional background preparation for the film.

As a practical point, I will make the changes to the course readings available shortly. Next week we will return to our regular schedule with a lecture on Marshall McLuhan.

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Gary McCarron
Associate Professor
School of Communication
Simon Fraser University
gmccarro@sfu.ca
778.782.3860