Media ecology ethics: Dwelling on the horizons

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Carey's remarkable ability to recognize intellectual connections is readily apparent in the two major collections of his work, Communication as Culture (Carey, 1989 Carey, J. W. 1989. Communication as culture: Essays on media and society, Boston: Unwin Hyman. [Google Scholar]) and James Carey: A Critical Reader (Carey, 1997 Carey , J. W. ( 1997 ). James Carey: A critical reader ( E. S. Munson & C. A. Warren ). Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press . [Google Scholar]). 2. I discuss the relationship of Carey's work and American cultural studies to the field of media ecology in greater depth in Echoes and Reflections (Strate, 2006a Strate, L. 2006a. Echoes and reflections: On media ecology as a field of study, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. [Google Scholar]), and see also Frederick Wasser's (2006 Wasser , F. ( 2006 ). James Carey: The search for cultural balance . In C. M. K. Lum Perspectives on culture, technology, and communication: The media ecology tradition . 255 – 274 . Cresskill, NJ : Hampton Press . [Google Scholar]) chapter along with Casey Man Kong Lum's Introduction in Perspectives on Culture, Technology, and Communication: The Media Ecology Intellectual Tradition (Lum, 2006 Lum , C. M. K. ( 2006 ) . Perspectives on culture, technology, and communication: The media ecology tradition . Cresskill, NJ : Hampton Press . [Google Scholar]), and the special issue of Explorations in Media Ecology devoted to James Carey (Strate, 2006b Strate , L. (2006b) . Explorations in Media Ecology 5(2) [special issue on James W. Carey] . [Google Scholar]) which includes the text of his Keynote Address to the 4th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association (Carey, 2006 Carey , J. W. ( 2006 ). Globalization, democracy and open communication: Can we have all three? Explorations in Media Ecology 5(2) [special issue on James W. Carey] , pp. 103 – 114 . [Google Scholar]). 3. Paul Heyer's (2003 Heyer, P. 2003. Harold Innis, Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield. [Google Scholar]) recent study of Harold Innis notes the centrality of Carey's views to subsequent scholarship relating to Harold Innis. It is also worth noting, in this context, Carey's (2004 Carey , J. W. ( 2004 ). Introduction to the Rowman & Littlefield edition . In Innis H. A. Changing concepts of time (rev. ed., pp.vii–xx) . Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield . [Google Scholar]) introduction to the new edition of Changing Concepts of Time (Innis, 2004 Innis , H. A. ( 2004 ). Changing concepts of time (rev. ed.) . Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield . [Google Scholar]). 4. Paul Grosswiler (2006 Grosswiler , P. ( 2006 ). The transformation of Carey on McLuhan: Admiration, rejection, and redemption . Explorations in Media Ecology 5(2) [special issue on James W. Carey] , pp. 137 – 148 . [Google Scholar]) discusses this largely undocumented shift in Carey's thinking, which was readily apparent in his 1998 Keynote Address, “Where Do We Go With Marshall McLuhan?” (Carey, 1998 Carey , J. W. ( 1998 ). “Where do we go with Marshall McLuhan?” Keynote Address given at the 56th Annual Convention of the New York State Communication Association, October 9–11, 1998, Monticello, NY. [Google Scholar]) given at the 56th Annual Convention of the New York State Communication Association at Kutsher's Country Club in Monticello, NY, in which Carey discussed the book about Innis and McLuhan that he had been working on (which he was not able to complete before he passed away). Additional informationNotes on contributorsLance StrateLance Strate is Professor of Communication and Media Studies and Director of the Graduate Program in Public Communication at Fordham University

This entry explores the use of the word ecology within approaches to the study of media and communication, focusing primarily on a review of the school of thought known as media ecology. As media ecology is primarily recognized for its association with theories of technology's role in social change, the entry offers clarification on the relevance of media ecology and differing theoretical approaches to media and social and cultural change. The entry also observes points of incommensurability between media ecology and other theoretical approaches within communication and media studies. It concludes with a review of secondary and tertiary uses of the term ecology , noting the critique of the media ecology school of thought—a critique embedded in what has been termed materialist media ecology.

Twitter Archives and the Challenges of "Big Social Data" for Media and Communication Research

Modernist Literature in the Modern Media Ecology

Mining Robotics and Media Change

Media ecology theory is the study of media, technology, and communication and how they affect human environments. The theoretical concepts were proposed by Marshall McLuhan in 1964, while the term media ecology was first formally introduced by Marshall McLuhan in 1962. Ecology in this context refers to the environment in which the medium is used—what they are and how they affect society. Neil Postman states, “Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people. An environment is, after all, a complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.” Media ecology argues that media act as extensions of the human senses in each era, and communication technology is the primary cause of social change. Every communication technology (medium) has fundamental physical, psychological, and social characteristics that are basically separate and fixed. These characteristics condition how users of a medium communicate, process information, give meaning to and make sense of the world. Every communication technology conditions users to think and to speak in specific ways. In order to understand how Twitter accomplishes this, the features that define Twitter need to be identified. Twitter is a microblogging platform, a form of blogging in which tweets typically consists of short phrases, quick comments, images or links to video’s limited to 280 characters. As a platform used for communication Twitter can be described as having three key features: simplicity, impulsiveness and incivility.

The 22nd Convention of the Media Ecology Association

Much as ecology emerged from biology as scientists began studying the complex interactions between organisms in their environments, a shift is happening in communication and media studies regarding analysis of social media. The complex relationships between user-generated social media and professionally created news media are best understood as a complex media ecosystem with its own emergent behaviors that only become visible when studied from a perspective broader than considering a single medium in isolation. Some of the key debates regarding social media’s effects in spreading mis- and disinformation can be studied in richer ways by applying quantitative methods that integrate information across multiple types of media using a media ecosystem model. Understanding these characteristics of media ecosystems could help political parties, activists and others who depend on media to advance their messages.

The article concentrates on the analyses of the content characteristics of the users’ activity patterns functioning in the media ecosystem. Media ecosystem is viewed by the author as information environment of a modern individual which dialectically connects the users’ media activity practices as well as the institutional conditions of their realization. The author refers to such key practices of users’ activity in the media ecosystem as media consumption and media production, notably an important factor of such practices realization are definite patterns and normals, which are the behavior models articulates in the media ecosystem environment. It is shown that these patterns and normals can be localized in such media sources as the news in mass media, fiction texts and program manifestations, technological regulations (exploitation rules, access procedures etc.), society knowledge (etiquette, etc.) of the network community. On the basis of the author’s sociological research, carried out using the content analyses (N=300) method (different types of media sources in the modern media ecosystem were studied), peculiarities of actual patterns and normals of users’ activity in media ecosystem are analyzed. The author shows how the imperative character of the patterns and normals declared reveals in a number of characteristics that are the criteria of the analyses. As a result of the research it was found out that the level of imperativeness of articulated patterns and normals is defined not only by their immediate localization (the type of media source where they were placed) but also by the referentiality of these normals to the unique experience of the users and the prevailing types of media activity.

<p>The aim of this review and theoretical study is to determine the importance of media ecology theory for communication and media studies. Bearing in mind this research goal, the following research questions were asked: What is the media ecology theory? What approach to media and communication research does it represent? What research perspectives are proposed in the field of media ecology? What new can media ecology bring to communication and media studies? An additional objective of the article, and, at the same, time the intention of the authors, is to raise the interest of Polish researchers in the subject of media ecology and its various aspects, enriching research in the field of communication and media studies.</p>

ABSTRACTMedia ecology has been regarded as a field of inquiry that can be defined as the study of media as environments. This definition indicates that media ecology can be understood as a particular approach to studying media, and it also follows that media ecology can be defined as a particular way of studying environments, the study of environments as media. Understood as a philosophical pursuit, albeit one that is not reducible to the formal discipline of philosophy, media ecology can be viewed as an approach to understanding the human condition. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s three categories of human activity—labor, work, and action—this article examines how they can be situated within three types of environment or media—the biophysical, the technological, and the symbolic.

The recent proliferation of scholarship outlining the intellectual roots of media ecology represents a welcome break from past scholarship that dismissed studies of forms of communication as mere technological determinism. In this essay, the work of two prominent communication and media studies scholars, Joshua Meyrowitz and James Carey, is examined in order to demonstrate how their studies represent media ecology with rigorous and insightful analyses of the dynamic interaction between communication, consciousness, and culture. Perhaps more importantly, this essay highlights how the works of these two media ecologists fit into and embody a North American cultural studies approach to media studies. The intent of this essay is to push the understanding of the intellectual roots of media ecology toward a broader analysis of how media ecology is embedded in, and advocates for, the larger move in communication studies away from narrow, quantitative effects research and towards qualitative and interdisciplinary scholarship that is North American cultural studies.

This paper aims at posing the basis for a new conceptualization of the impact of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media in international politics by creating a dialogue between the practice theoretical approach in IR (Adler and Pouliot 2011) and the medium theory in media studies (Meyrowitz 1985). Building on these approaches, the paper argues that in order to understand the role of the media in international politics it is necessary to shift the focus from media outlets and organisations to the media as environments, and from media content to media ecology. In fact, the paper argues that changes in the media ecology can produce changes in the social settings where international practices develop. It particular, it argues that the media ecology can affect the articulation of public and private and lead to the emergence of international practices where appropriate and competent behaviour reconstitute the private in the public (and vice versa). To explore its theoretical claims further and clarify how useful this approach can be to understand the role of the media in the Middle East, the paper discusses how an Israeli/Iranian movement catalysed by a Facebook (FB) page attempts at fostering peace. It explains how such a group has developed a Transnational Activist Network (TAN) bringing people together through shared private experiences.

In the midst of theoretical debates and traditions concerning “materialism” (also new), “realism” (speculative) and “objects” (object-oriented philosophy), one of the most important things to reali...

In a media ecosystem besieged with misinformation and polarizing rhetoric, what the news media chooses not to cover can be as significant as what they do cover. In this article, we examine the historical production of silence in journalism to better understand the role amplification plays in the editorial and content moderation practices of current news media and social media platforms. Through the lens of strategic silence (i.e., the use of editorial discretion for the public good), we examine two U.S.-based case studies where media coverage produces public harms if not handled strategically: White violence and suicide. We analyze the history of journalistic choices to illustrate how professional and ethical codes for best practices played a key role in producing a more responsible field of journalism. As news media turned to online distribution, much has changed for better and worse. Platform companies now curate news media alongside user generated content; these corporations are largely responsible for content moderation on an enormous scale. The transformation of gatekeepers has led an evolution in disinformation and misinformation, where the creation and distribution of false and hateful content, as well as the mistrust of social institutions, have become significant public issues. Yet it is not just the lack of editorial standards and ethical codes within and across platforms that pose a challenge for stabilizing media ecosystems; the manipulation of search engines and recommendation algorithms also compromises the ability for lay publics to ascertain the veracity of claims to truth. Drawing on the history of strategic silence, we argue for a new editorial approach—“strategic amplification”—which requires both news media organizations and platform companies to develop and employ best practices for ensuring responsibility and accountability when producing news content and the algorithmic systems that help spread it.