Media ecology takes an urban turn

This article explains how Jacques Ellul’s conception of technique intervenes into media ecology pedagogy. Technique appears in media ecology pedagogy through attempts to turn media ecology into an academic discipline and by placing discussions of media ecology in the classroom into the realm of communication theory. The intervention of technique on media ecology pedagogy undercuts the major tenets of media ecology and its ethical orientation, and this intervention also undermines media ecology’s potency to elucidate the human condition. As an alternative to discipline and theory, this article forwards tradition, practice and narrative as pedagogical options and orientations, which allow media ecologists to carry the study of media as environments into a variety of classroom contexts and discussions.

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

n/a

In recent years, scholars have devoted more attention to the “prophetic” critique of mass media. Clifford Christians has served as both an originator and an ongoing contributor to these discussions. Beginning with his doctoral thesis on Jacques Ellul, a concern for the prophetic has been a consistent thread throughout his career. This paper begins by examining Ellul's influence on Christians's approach, with an emphasis on media ecology, ontology, and the concept of technique. I then summarize Christians's critique of Ellul, and explain how his unique vision addresses Ellul's shortcomings. In outlining Christians's unique approach, I highlight the ways in which authenticity serves as an axial value permeating his work. In Christians's work, prophetic witness against technological fetishism is a means of protecting certain universal values such as “cultural continuity” and “authentic Being.” Through a brief examination of media coverage of Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Jim Wallis, and the United Church of Christ, I show how Christians's discussion of authenticity and prophetic critique are not only applicable but uniquely relevant in the emerging new media environment. At this critical juncture in media, Christians's prophetic voice is among the most relevant and necessary that critical scholarship has to offer.

Jacques Ellul was a self-proclaimed ‘watchman’ over the progression of twentieth-century technology, and he argues that humans have adopted a sociological determinism that he dubbed ‘technique’, an idea explored in his widely read book The Technological Society (1964). Technique, for Ellul, explains both large-scale and small-scale trends in human civilizations by considering rationalized efficiency as the primary instigator of twentieth-century change. This article argues that Ellul’s conception of technique as a determining factor in technological change has been subsumed by a trend not for rationalized efficiency but rather for evolved efficiency. Specifically, I look at the underlying hypothesis that informed Ellul’s thought – his theory of the three milieus – to offer an interpretative framework for understanding how several current civilizations have moved into a fourth milieu of virtuality. Positing a fourth milieu could potentially revitalize Ellulian scholarship in studies of technology, media ecology and sustainability.

Media ecology is a clearly defined branch of the field of media studies and, among scholars who define themselves as media ecologists, is often recognized as a discipline in its own right. It offers a coherent, specific, and highly generative framework for thinking about and understanding media. Media ecology is specific in that practitioners in the larger discipline of media studies tend to focus on one (or a combination) of four areas: media content, audiences, the industry and industrial practice, or media themselves. Media ecologists focus expressly on the latter: the nature of media themselves. To do so, they often call upon an approach that compares and contrasts media to one another, and which is based upon a certain view of the history of our media of human communication. This history, as it is largely agreed upon, is comprised of four “revolutionary” inventions in media: fully developed and conventionally shared systems of oral, or speech language; systems of writing, with their pinnacle achievement in alphabetic writing; the mechanical, movable-type printing press and its consequences; and the development of our electric/electronic means of communication beginning with the 19th-century invention of telegraphy. The jury remains out with respect to the idea of a revolution or revolutions after television arose as our most powerful medium of electronic mass communication. Disagreement on this matter has led to some of the most fruitful developments in media ecology scholarship, as scholars argue whether digitization, computer-mediated communication, the Internet, mobility and the mobile Internet, and social media, while themselves electric/electronic, represent not merely a fifth revolution in our contemporary age but possibly a series of revolutions in the making, or which have already taken place. In addition, media ecology can be said to be comprised of two “schools.” The first is the Toronto School of Communication Theory—the very term “media ecology” having arisen out of the probing wordplay of H. Marshall McLuhan, who is considered both the founding figure and patron saint of the discipline. The second school is the New York School, founded by the educationist Neil Postman. As an English-language educator at the moment television was having its initial impact on US culture, Postman was, along with McLuhan, presciently concerned about the impact of the medium’s visual/image-based emphasis for the traditions and gifts of the print-literate culture up to that time. Postman was greatly influenced by McLuhan’s work, became both a champion and a clarifier of McLuhan’s ideas, and established a PhD program in media ecology at New York University in 1970. This bibliography presents the Essential Readings in the field, followed by works about: Orality and Its Antecedents; Writing; Print; Electric/Electronic Media; “New” Media and Perspective on the New Revolution/s; and Fully Understanding Media and Media Ecology.

Reviewed by: William Faulkner in the Media Ecology ed. by Julian Murphet and Stefan Solomon Patrick E. Horn William Faulkner in the Media Ecology. Edited by Julian Murphet and Stefan Solomon. Southern Literary Studies. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. [xii], 276. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-5948-4.) This important new collection of essays grew out of an Australian research project titled “William Faulkner between Cinema and Literature,” which in turn sponsored an international conference on “Faulkner in the Media Ecology” at the University of New South Wales. It was therefore born global in ways that appeal to this southerner’s soul. However, replacing the title “Cinema and Literature” with the more theoretical (and more vague, hence conference-friendly) “Media Ecology” threatens to obscure the collection’s originating question: how did the rapidly evolving technologies of the early-twentieth-century film industry and its major architects influence and engage William Faulkner’s life and work? Previous scholarly forums and publications have posed similar questions. The University of Mississippi’s 2010 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference focused on “Faulkner and Film,” and selected essays from that conference were published in 2014. A search for scholarly articles on Faulkner and film published since 2010 yielded thousands of results as I sat down to write this review, and that number grows almost daily. And so the Faulkner factory continues to generate ever more light and heat, seeming to contradict the core principles of literary physics. [End Page 709] So, how to define this “media ecology”? According to an excellent introduction by Julian Murphet, the “techno-mediation” that Faulkner lived through and wrote about included traditional media technologies—radio, film, television, photography, the phonograph, the telegraph—as well as American culture’s mediation by other forms of technology—automobile, air, and rail travel as well as news journalism, monetary currency, and even celebrity status (p. 5). These “technologies,” which existed during the writer’s lifetime, were “mechanical and electric, if not yet digital” (p. 9). This answers one major question that the collection raises: whose “media ecology” are we talking about? Here I would caution potential readers that this book does not adequately address twenty-first-century media ecologies. There is little talk of social media or streaming video in these pages, although certain essays reference contemporary photo-editing software and recent television miniseries. Nevertheless, this book does many things well. As a conglomeration of erstwhile conference papers, it manages to hold together, both through the juxtaposition of thematically related essays and through a certain theoretical lingua franca. Theorists such as Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and Theodor W. Adorno make frequent appearances, lending a sense of coherence among essays that otherwise range widely. Many essays offer brief but fascinating (and well-documented) history lessons on the emergence of particular technologies, which will be especially interesting to students and scholars of cultural studies, American studies, and science and literature. Often these histories disclose that new technologies inspired Faulkner’s thinking less through the revelatory modes of perception that they made possible than through their early foibles and shortcomings. Other themes emerge, such as the notion that despite Faulkner’s adversarial relationships to the various technologies discussed herein, his work frequently attempted to co-opt and supersede the new modes of thinking that they made possible. For example, John T. Matthews compellingly argues that The Sound and the Fury (1929) moves from “the most purely cinematic narration” in its first section (that is, Benjy’s) to more traditional forms of literary narration in subsequent sections (Quentin’s and Jason’s), culminating with a return to “the conventions of realist fiction” in section four (p. 30). In sum, Matthews argues, “The Sound and the Fury is the novel that swallowed the movies” (p. 30). This is not a book that most readers will read from cover to cover: there is simply too much high-octane scholarship to take in, even under a rigorous reading regime. It would provide a meaningful backbone to a graduate seminar on Faulkner and film, or literature and media theory. Yet many of these essays can be understood and appreciated on their own. Jay Watson, for example, invites...

When new technologies emerge, they inevitably bring to mind many of the same questions that media scholars have been asking for decades. In this study, we will analyse Apple AirPods through a theoretical framework based in the writings of media ecologists like Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, as well as media theorist Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno is included here because very few articles in media ecology scholarship discuss his contributions to media research. The exclusion of Adorno from media ecology appears to relate to his different ontological assumptions about media. While Innis, McLuhan and Postman contribute to the ‘structures and patterns narrative’ of medium theory, Adorno clearly fits into the ‘power and resistance narrative’ of critical/cultural studies. However, there are more significant connections between Adorno and the field of media ecology than have been previously acknowledged. In particular, there is a confluence between Adorno’s writings and others by media ecology scholars like Postman and Lewis Mumford, particularly in Adorno’s arguments about technology and music. In this article, we consider the question: can Adorno’s writings on technology be considered appropriate for inclusion in the media ecology canon? In this article, we will explore representative essays from Adorno’s extensive body of work on music reproduction technologies and discuss the parallels between his arguments and those made by others in media ecology.

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.

I had the great privilege of working with Marshall McLuhan from 1974 to his passing on December 31, 1980. I have since then devoted most of my research to preserving and enhancing the McLuhan legacy of which media ecology is one of his most important contributions. Media ecology is a general systems approach to understanding the impact of media, technology and communications. (...)

This review is a synthesis and analysis of the evolution, core concepts and the future implications of media ecology on human thought and perception. It is an interdisciplinary subject that studies media as environments impacting societal frameworks, cultural practices and human perceptions. With Marshal McLuhan’s “Medium is the message” and later developments by Walter J. Ong and Neil Postman in the middle of the 20th century. This article is an effort to pay tribute to theorists, researchers, and media specialists on the media ecology. 100 peer- reviewed articles, books and seminal monographs were reviewed and analyzed to construct the solid foundations of the New Media Ecology. The main objective of this article was to create a theoretical framework for the understanding of media ecology theory. The review is based on two main nodes: media as environment and media as species. The deductive approach has been implied to carry out this detailed descriptive analysis. It's the study of how different forms of communication affect human perception, cognition, emotion, and value, as well as how our participation in media helps or hurts our chances of survival. It's challenging to research media ecology since all habitats are essentially intangible and interrelated, making evaluation difficult. This article's content is based on the researches highlighting the need for explanations of new theories and metaphors in contemporary media ecology. Using these findings, we can now begin delving into the interpretation of future metaphors, relating them to society and its mediating wishes and expectations, as well as their origins. The gaps identified in the study is have longitudinal study on media environments and media literacy of the diverse ecological settings.

Speech Is Dead; Long Live Speech

Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited. Lance Strate. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. 170 pp. $159.95 hbk. $39.95 pbk.In equal measures homage, elegy, literature review, and media critique, Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited by Lance Strate is apt reading for students and scholars in media and communication. During his doctoral studies at New York University, Strate was a student of Neil Postman, so Strate's admiration for Postman as a leader in media ecology suffuses this book. Today, Strate teaches communication and media studies at Fordham University and is recognized for his contributions to the field. Amazing Ourselves to Death is a concentrated update of Postman's landmark book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985). Strate deftly recaps Postman's original plaints about public mass deterioration of critical thinking via debased e-amusements. Strate updates his former professor's theses, incorporating into his own analysis newly emerging technologies. Strate echoes Postman in theorizing that computerized, quantified modes of media often engender habits of cognitive slothfulness, moral ambivalence, and collective detachment, none of which bodes well for American society.Amazing Ourselves to Death offers an insightful, biographical understanding of how Postman was influenced by authors such as Aldous Huxley, who wrote futuristic novels and essays, notably Brave New World (1932), and wise analysts of propaganda, like Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan. Where Postman distinguished himself as an academic and media critic, and where Strate in this book continues to prod us to see anew, is showing the layered ways freedom is sacrificed for the sake of fun. That said, neither did Postman, nor does Strate here, evince neo-Luddite attitudes. To the contrary, they both value democratizing effects from greater access to information. But Strate urges taking the Postmanian view that each unfolding innovation . . . [has costs] . . . and sometimes what is lost will outweigh what is gained. Strate asks readers to take a chastened double-take at the world's overwhelming environmental and justice issues, and wonder, Will technology save us?Strate, like Postman, argues convincingly that questionable technological processes seem innocuous by being relegated to background status. Who among us notices anymore that everyone we see is holding a cell phone? In our post-Postman technopoly, efficient appurtenances are taken for granted. The normalization of behaviors that counter civic participation includes trading contemplative habits, such as deep reading, for entertaining habits, such as TV watching with simultaneous techno-distractions such as web surfing. Superficial media grabs attention as it creates attention deficits. Strate explains that televisual/cyber pass-times, via the latest wow-factor gadgets propelling them, such as trendy apps, are connected to a collective process of cultural coarsening and political self-delusion. …

General systems theory (allgemeine systemtheorie) was pursued by a number of thinkers but its origins seems to date back to 1928 and the biological work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s PhD thesis. There are many definitions of a general system but in essence a general system is one that is composed of interacting and interrelated components such that and understanding of it must entail considering the general system as a whole and not as a collection of individual components. The behaviour of the individual components of a general system can only be understood in the context of the whole system and not in isolation and hence general system theory is opposed to reductionism whether of a Cartesian or Newtonian origin. As is often the case by taking a systemic approach there are often unintended consequences that an analysis of individual components would yield. General systems theory therefore includes complexity theory, emergent dynamics, cybernetics, control theory, dynamic systems theory, biological ecology, and media ecology. The focus of this essay is to consider the parallels of the different forms of general systems theory with media ecology and consider how they inform each other. The general systems approach is an ecological approach since an ecosystem is a general system by definition. From a media ecology perspective as first suggested by Marshall McLuhan (1964), the medium is the message. A general system is a medium. Its message is the non-linear interactions of the components of the system. McLuhan wrote, “A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them (McLuhan 1964, 174).” The same applies to a general system; each element of a general system or ecosystem impacts all the other components of the system. The message of the general system is the dynamics and cross impacts of its components and not the behavior of the individual members of the system. The general system is the unit of analysis. So we might say that the medium is the general system is the message. General systems theory and cybernetics are intimately related and in a certain sense inform and cross-pollinate each other to such a degree that some regard them as slightly different formulations of the same interdisciplinary practice. One may also include in this mix emergent dynamics or complexity theory as these approaches also consider a system as more than its components with the added feature that they explicitly entail the notion that the supervenient system (i.e. the general system) possesses properties that none of its components possess. In other words, the system as a whole has unintended consequences which an analysis of its components cannot reveal. Emergent dynamics and complexity theory grew out of the general systems approach when computing techniques allowed scientists to deal with non-linear equations and, hence, as a result were able to model general systems in which the interactions among the components of a system were non-linear.

MEDIA ECOLOGY ASSOCIATION CONVENTION NEW YORK, NEW YORK JUNE 22-26, 2005 From June 22-26, 2005, scholars from around the globe gathered at Ford-ham University in New York City for the Association's sixth annual convention with the theme of Biases of Media. The expression Media Ecology is the term Neil Postman used in 1970 to designate the then newly formed PhD program at New York University. This program began to study media and communication technologies from a broad-based, multidisciplinary, and socio-historical perspective. Seven years ago, the Association (MEA) was founded to bring together the New York, Toronto, and St. Louis schools, along with others who shared an interest in the media ecology intellectual tradition. This year's convention--larger than ever, including the addition of an extra day of workshops and lectures--was a high-power event of scholarly presentations, engaging discussions, and artistic productions. Convention participants met and interacted with scholars, artists, and activists from the fields of anthropology, graphic arts, philosophy, physics, theology, sociology, media, and communications. They also attended a wide range of events spanning political, theological, economic, philosophical, scientific, and artistic dimensions. Featured presentations focused on the works of Walter J. Ong, Harold A. Innis, Postman, and of course, Marshall McLuhan. Among the featured speakers were noted scholars such as James Carey, Frank E. X. Dance, Paul Levinson, Eric McLuhan, Paul Soukup, and Sarah van den Berg. Smaller break-out sessions addressed a wide range of media ecology interests: the dimensions of faith and the sacred in communication, the study of visual communication, the relations between communication and culture, ancient and modern rhetoric, the relevance of general semantics, digital technologies, and the implications of new and emerging media. There were also more directed workshops including one on mime and McLuhan by Wayne Constantineau, a workshop on general semantics-based media literacy given by Gregg Hoffmann, and a media ethnography workshop by John Carey. Mary Ann Allison, this year's winner of the Harold A. Innis Award for Outstanding Thesis or Dissertation in the Field, offered a workshop on virtual community, Mark Dery led another on the sexual grotesque online, and Paul Guzzardo from the MediaARTS Alliance presented on art and surveillance. Patricia Keeler helped to demonstrate the labyrinth as sacred space. The convention was bookended by sessions on media authorship and creativity featuring such writers and video artists as Marleen Barr, Leslie Carroll, Michael Joyce, Andrew Postman, Meir Z. Ribalow, Douglas Rushkoff, Katie Salen, David Shenk, and Marina Zurkow. The conference also featured a few performative events, including a screening of this year's winner of the John Culkin award, a video documentary entitled A Conversation with Neil Postman (2003), and a wonderfully amusing live musical performance entitled Media Unplugged by Bill Bly and John McDaid. …