Robert K. Logan (born August 31, 1939), originally trained as a physicist, is a media ecologist.
His best known works are The Alphabet Effect – based on a paper Logan co-authored with McLuhan – which develops the hypothesis that the alphabet, codified law, monotheism, abstract science and deductive logic form an autocatalytic set of ideas that developed uniquely between 2000 BC and 500 BC between the Tigris-Euphrates river system and the Aegean Sea; The Sixth Language: Learning a Living in the Internet Age which deals with the hypothesis that speech, writing, math, science, computing and the Internet form an evolutionary chain of languages; The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind and Culture develops a model for the origin of language, the human mind and culture using ideas from The Sixth Language.
[2] Part of his work at OCAD involved a language-based project to change popular attitudes about the environment, which resulted in the coining of the word "depletist".
[3] Logan's work is influenced by Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Alvin Toffler, Stuart Kauffman and Terrence Deacon.
The Sixth Language won the Suzanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form in 2000 from the Media Ecology Association,[4] and in June 2011 Logan received the Walter J. Ong Award for Career Achievement in Scholarship from the same Association.