For those who might be interested there is an excellent Canadian web site that explores media literacy issues: http://www.media-awareness.ca/
Brian
-- Obituary / Ivan Illich /Ivan Illich Ivan Illich, who has died of cancer aged 76, was one of the world's great thinkers, a polymath whose output covered vast terrains. He worked in 10 languages; he was a jet-age ascetic with few possessions; he explored Asia and South America on foot; and his obligations to his many collaborators led to a constant criss-crossing of the globe in the past two decades.Best known for his polemical writings against Western institutions from the 1970s, caricatured by the right and disdained by the left for their attacks on the welfare state, in his last 20 years he became an officially forgotten, troublesome figure. This position obscures the true importance of his contribution. His critique of modernity was founded on a deep understanding of the birth of institutions in the 13th century, a critical period in church history that enlightened all of his work, whether about gender, reading or materiality. He was far more significant as an archaeologist of ideas, someone who helped us to see the present in a truer and richer perspective, than as an ideologue. Illich was born in Vienna into a family with Jewish, Dalmatian and Catholic roots. He never found a home again after his family left Vienna in 1941. He was educated in that city and in Florence, before reading histology and crystallography atFlorence University. He entered the priesthood and studied theology and philosophy at the Vatican's Gregorian University from 1943-46. He started work as a priest in an Irish and Puerto Rican parish in New York, popularising the church through close contact with the Latino community and respect for its traditions. He applied these methods on a larger scale when, in 1956, he was vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, and later, in 1961, as founder of the Centro Intercultural de Documentacion (CIDOC) at Cuernavaca in Mexico, a research centre which offered courses for missionaries arriving from North America. The radical CIDOC was wound up 10 years later by the consent of its members. By this time Illich had resigned active duty as a priest, sidestepping a conflict with the conservative Vatican authorities, who now opposed CIDOC. Illich retained a lifelong base in Cuernavaca, but travelled constantly. His intellectual activity focused on major institutions of the industrialised world. In concise books he addressed education (Deschooling Society, 1971), technological development (Tools For Conviviality, 1973), energy, transport and economic development (Energy And Equity, 1974), medicine (Medical Nemesis, 1976) and work (The Right To Useful Unemployment And Its Professional Enemies, 1978, and Shadow Work, 1981). He analysed the corruption of institutions that, he said, ended up by performing the opposite of their initial purpose. He saw the roots of this process in the institutionalisation of charity in the 13th-century church. His 1982 book, Gender, argued that the difference between feminine and masculine domains had been sacrificed to the idea of neutral work, capitalism creating and depending on the simplistic coupling of the male wage labourer and the woman as mother to produce new workers. The late 1980s and 1990s saw the flowering of his interests. There was the historicity of materials (H<->2</->O and The Waters Of Forgetfulness, 1985), literacy (ABC, The Alphabetisation Of The Popular Mind, 1988, co-written with Barry Sanders) and the origins of book-learning (In The Vineyard Of The Text, 1993). In essays and through the work of collaborators he addressed themes as diverse as the history of the gaze, friendship, hospitality, bioethics, body history and space. His final bases were in Bremen, Cuernavaca and Pennsylvania. His brilliance and spirituality sustained him in a heroic level of activity over the past 10 years in the context of a disfiguring cancer. Following the thesis of Medical Nemesis, he administered his own medication against the advice of doctors. He was able to finish a history of pain which will be published in French next year, as will his complete works. Andrew Todd and Franco La Cecla <I> Ivan Illich, thinker, born September 4, 1926; died December 2, 2002</I> The Guardian Weekly 20-2-1212, page 22
