Frank Zingrone, a respected Canadian communications scholar, explores the paralyzing power of new communication technologies, while offering a way out of an age of computerized chaos in his most recent book, The Media Symplex: At the Edge of Meaning in the Age of Chaos.

Zingrone, a founding member of the department of communications at York University in Toronto, where he is a senior scholar and fellow of Vanier College, has also taught at M.I.T., SUNY (Buffalo), and the University of Toronto where he was a colleague and friend of Marshall McLuhan.

He served as the editor of Who Was Marshall McLuhan?, and was also co-editor with McLuhan's son Eric, of Essential McLuhan. Zingrone's work has appeared in The James Joyce Quarterly, Modern Poetry Studies, The Canadian Journal of Communication, The Canadian Forum, University of Toronto Quarterly, and McLuhan Studies.

In addition to his specialty in communications, Zingrone has a comprehensive background in 20th Century Literature, and is also an accomplished poet. He has published two collections of poetry, Traces, which appeared in 1980, and Strange Attraction, published last year by Colombo & Company of Toronto.

Derek Alger: You dedicate your recent book The Media Symplex: At the Edge of Meaning in the Age of Chaos to Marshall McLuhan, as your teacher, mentor, colleague and friend. Obviously he had a significant influence on you.

Frank Zingrone: I first met Marshall McLuhan on a tout, really. I simply walked into a guest lecture he was giving at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto. I wasn't expecting much because, up to that point — I had recently returned to university to study literature and linguistics — I hadn't been excited intellectually at all.

DA: But McLuhan changed that?

FZ: The experience of that lecture by McLuhan was so remarkable that I found I had cold sweat trickling down my sides. I can hardly explain how overwhelming it was to have the twentieth century explained and dropped on my plate like a code for the meaning of the modern age, broken and all its secrets revealed in an almost arcane fashion involving electronic media, subliminal perception, French symbolism, the poetry of T.S. Eliot and Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, to name just a few of the crucial elements of understanding contemporary communication theory. At the end of that lecture I can remember having this feeling of exalted completion in having acquired some real and useful knowledge.

DA: How did your relationship with McLuhan developed from that first encounter?

FZ: My relationship with McLuhan developed quickly, less along student/teacher lines and more like a collegial bonding. He saw quickly that I was on his wavelength. He liked my work even in its hesitant, early form and honored me by including a few of my observations, verbatim, in The Gutenberg Galaxy. That meant a lot to me then, as it still does.

DA: So McLuhan had an influence on you from the beginning?

FZ: He and my committee chair, Donald Theall, thought I should go to SUNY-Buffalo to work with the original manuscripts of Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, which I did, and soon my relationship with McLuhan became quite collegial and I was involved in getting Marshall as the keynote speaker at the 1965 Buffalo Spring Festival of the Arts. He was a big hit and sent people like Leslie Fielder and Charles Olson reeling back to their studies.

DA: Sounds like you two were a good match.

FZ: McLuhan's strong endorsement got me hired at MIT so I didn't see him or correspond with him for several years while I was living in Boston. Later, when I returned to Toronto, we lunched occasionally, not often, and we gadded about town a little. He would call me always late at night, eleven or later, to discuss new perceptions. Toward the end of a long and faithful relationship I tried to help him save the Centre (The Centre for Culture and Technology) at the University of Toronto from being closed by thrift obsessed morons in the university's hierarchy. In 1994, fourteen years after his death, I was asked by Barrington Nevitt to help him get out Who Was Marshall McLuhan? We did that and along with a good biography and Wired magazine taking McLuhan up as a patron saint on their masthead, the prescience of the man gave him a second coming. The Essential McLuhan I put together in 1995 to further make his work available to a whole new younger audience and because much of his work was out of print by then.