John McDaid

Academic Work

McDaid's scholarly work sits at the intersection of media ecology, digital narrative theory, and the emerging field of electronic literature. He did doctoral work in Media Ecology at New York University and holds an MFA in fiction from the Newport MFA at Salve Regina University. He teaches media theory courses at Roger Williams University.

Current

  • The borders of creativity: Process and affordance in generative AI Latest
    Media Ecology Association, 2026
    When generative AI enters public discourse it arrives pre-loaded with moral panic—theft, cognitive debt, the death of literature—and, as McLuhan warned, a moral stance too readily substitutes for understanding a new medium. This talk brackets the panic to ask a narratological question: what does the large language model, as a medium, actually afford? Drawing on two practices—BuddyGPT, a model customized on the curated corpus of my hypermedia novel Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse, and Breakfast With Moloch, a musical developed in a "writers' room" of three frontier models—I argue that the medium's signature affordance is the realization of texts implicit in a corpus but never actualized: curation and prompting as a mode of authorship that calls latent works into being. The central finding, though, is that this affordance and the medium's deepest limitation are a single structural feature seen from two sides. Because the model composes by forward association and has no unconscious, the same innocence that lets it wander into narrative regions a human author's deformations foreclose also bars it from retrieving by depth—yielding the characteristic failures I call "Juicy Fruit" and "caisson" errors. Read through McLuhan's extension and auto-amputation, Eco's cliché as the gravitational pull of the already-said, and the posthumanism of Hayles and Ferrando, the human/machine relation resolves not into hierarchy but into complementary asymmetry—two ways of descending into a text, only one of which knows what it was looking for.
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Recent Work

  • Seeing things: The human search for meaningful patterns and the media ecology of computer-generated text Recent
    Media Ecology Association, 2022
    Human brains, by evolutionary design, find pattern and impute agency (Foster and Kokko, 2009, Churchland, 2019). Computer-generated texts (in particular, narrative) have reached a level of complexity such that we experience them in everyday contexts without interrogating their way of coming to presence, raising concerns that echo critiques by both philosophers and media theorists. A machine “finished” Beethoven’s 10th Symphony; gamers are immersed in an entirely computer-generated text adventures, and computer “poetry” and chatbots have proliferated across the Web. Our inbuilt assumptions about pattern and agency are triggered by such experiences. This raises important questions for those studying the communication technology as an environment—what Marshall McLuhan called media ecology (Media Ecology Association, 2021)—about understanding and managing the implications of human interaction with such computer-generated texts.
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Selected Publications & Presentations

  • "Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse" — subject of Traversals
    MIT Press, 2017  ·  Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop, authors
    Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing devotes extended scholarly analysis to Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse, situating it in the history of digital literature. The project grew out of a 2013 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to the Electronic Literature Organization for the preservation of early digital texts.
  • "We Knew The Glass Man" — ACM Conference Presentation
    Association for Computing Machinery, Hof, Germany, September 2019
    Invited speaker; read from and was interviewed about the interactive fiction work built in Twine and published in Cream City Review.
  • ACM Hypertext Conference Program Committee
    1999, 2000
    Served on the program committee for the Association for Computing Machinery Hypertext conferences.
  • TINAC Collective — Digital Narrative Writing and Scholarship
    Various venues, 1990s–present
    As a member of the TINAC collective, McDaid wrote on digital narrative and spoke at dozens of colleges and conferences. [TK — additional titles and venues to be added]
  • Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fictional Work Award
    Media Ecology Association
    Awarded for "Keyboard Practice, consisting of an Aria with diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with two manuals" (F&SF, January 2005), which was also a Nebula Award and Sturgeon Award finalist.
  • Coordinator of Computer Composition, NYU Expository Writing Program
    New York University, 1988
    Helped create one of the first hypertext writing programs within Expository Writing at NYU. Taught writing and communication courses at NYU, Adelphi University, and the New York Institute of Technology during seven years in academia.
  • [Additional publications and conference papers TK]
    Various venues
    Additional bibliography to be added.

Research Interests

McDaid's research focuses on the ecology of media forms — how different media environments shape cognition, narrative, and culture. His work draws on the McLuhan–Postman tradition of media ecology, digital humanities methodology, and the practical experience of writing literary fiction and hypertext in multiple forms.

Current and ongoing interests include: the phenomenology of interactive narrative; the cultural history of hypertext; the relationship between constraint and creativity in songwriting and fiction; and the political economy of attention in contemporary media environments.

He attended Syracuse University and the New School University, and did doctoral work in Media Ecology at NYU.

For scholarly correspondence: jmcdaid@johnmcdaid.com