Media Ecology

Abstract

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.