Amid the devastation of a worldwide pandemic, catastrophic wildfires, and expanding political crises, the 22nd Convention of the Media Ecology Association (MEA) was held under the theme of “Dystopic Futures: Media Ecology in an Algorithm Society” to discuss the emerging dystopia that seems to haunt the present and foreshadow the future. Hosted by Brazil’s Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro), the conference was scheduled to meet in person in Rio but the continued threat of COVID-19 pushed the proceedings from interpersonal space into the online environment we know as “Zoom.”For those readers unfamiliar with the term, “media ecology” is an approach to the study of human communication that aims to make us more aware and more critical of the technologies that form our environment and socialize our patterns of thought, feeling, and interaction. Given the broad approach of media ecology, the conference included participants from around the world and featured a wide range of presentations relating to education, feminism, music, news, journalism, gaming, oral history, the future of democracy, religion, speech, sports, self-identity in the digital age, artificial intelligence, propaganda, hate speech, literature, film, social activism, and discussions concerning the work of major media scholars including Marshall McLuhan, Christine Nystrom, Neil Postman, Jacques Ellul, Walter Ong, Hannah Arendt, and many others.In opening remarks, Fordham University professor and co-founder of MEA Lance Strate noted that “dystopia is no longer an obscure word” but reflects a growing anxiety about the world in which we live. Josh Meyrowitz, professor emeritus from the University of New Hampshire, added “we are in a lot of trouble” and cautioned that we in the United States may have just experienced our “last free election.” He was concerned that “even educated people seem to have a problem reading anything longer than a tweet.”Celebrated media critic and social activist Naomi Klein, winner of this year’s Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, given by the MEA, addressed the convention through a conversation with media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. Klein wove together a critique of dystopia, corporate capitalism, and digital technology with a plea for greater social activism. In his introductory remarks, Rushkoff quoted Larissa MacFarquhar of the New Yorker who described Klein as “the most visible and influential figure on the American left.” Klein noted that our contemporary information environment is “toxic” and acknowledged as well her indebtedness to Postman, whose early insights into the nature of electronic media and education emphasized the necessity for shared social narratives if we are to survive in this new environment. In closing, Klein urged the creation of opportunities for young people to experience meaningful and important work that would help provide reasons to struggle for a better world.The arts have always held a significant place in media ecology thought and scholarship and were well represented at the conference. McLuhan famously compared the societal role of the artist to that of the precocious child in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who shouts out that the king has no clothes. Whereas others fail to see or refuse to acknowledge the obvious truths right before their eyes, the artist becomes sort of a modern-day Paul Revere who alerts us to new possibilities and imminent dangers.Reflecting this interest in the arts, the conference included a virtual art exhibit (featuring work by Carolin Aronis, Bernadette “bird” Bowen, Sara Falco, and Adeena Karasick), a photographic essay by Susana Dobal, film screenings (Adriana Braga’s Howie and The Outsiders [2020] and Roko Belic’s Trust Me [2020]), and a musical performance of Brazilian “choro” music by the Juliana Sucupira Trio.In keeping with the theme of the conference, several papers reflected on the dystopian visions imagined by artists in print or on film. Arthur W. Hunt III of the University of Tennessee presented a paper arguing that E. M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” (1909) “anticipated the social and psychological impact of today’s electronic media.” José Luiz Balestrini Jr. and Leonardo Torres of the Universidade Paulista, Brazil, noted that many fiction authors—such as Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, and José Saramago—prophesied notions of a coming dystopia. Tim Michaels of Slippery Rock University argued that “While [George] Orwell foresaw dystopia built from pain and [Aldous] Huxley foresaw it from pleasure,” Kurt Vonnegut in his 1952 novel Player Piano “more accurately predicted that technocratic dystopias are instead a product of apathy.” Peter Ramey of Northern State University added that Richard Harris’s 2019 novel The Second Sleep “offers fruit ripe for reflecting on our current condition and the role played by digital technologies that increasingly mediate our lives.”There were those, of course, who took issue with the gloom and doom of the dystopian theme that permeated the conference. “Since its popularization in late nineteenth-century literature,” observed Erik Gustafson of North Dakota State University, “the dystopic narrative in written and visual/electronic form has increased markedly.” Gustafson went on to argue, however, that this sharp increase has more to do with the media themselves than with an impending doom, claiming, “Findings suggest that the removal of pre-requisite conditions (i.e. literacy, rational thought, linearity) of reading by film not only intensifies the experience of dystopic ideas, but also distracts from the individual’s ability to think critically and reflexively about the ideas.” Maria Polski of East-West University urged listeners not to panic and offered a counter argument to challenge the narrative of an advancing dystopia. Her presentation placed “current attitudes in the context of psychological research [and outlined] an algorithm to approach the realistic challenges presented by digital media and algorithms, without falling into despair and hopelessness.”Among the Brazilian presenters, there was a marked interest in the ways in which digital media can be used as a tool to record, disseminate, affirm, and empower marginalized populations. One panel consisting of students and faculty from the hosting university, Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, reported on a project they had developed called “iNSpira FAveLa iNSpira” (2021). The project records testimonials of residents who discuss strategies used for coping with COVID-19 in the context of life in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Davison Coutinho noted that “the project was born out of an issue that became recurrent in the face of the Coronavirus epidemic: the low visibility in the mass media of the specific obstacles that affect favela residents and, on the other hand, the creative initiatives that emerge daily in this scenario.”A roundtable discussion celebrated the contributions of one of the key founders of media ecology, Christine Nystrom, who taught for many years with Postman in the media ecology program at New York University. Corey Anton of Grand Valley State University noted that it was Nystrom who had laid out the broad and bold multidisciplinary framework that characterizes media ecology. Susan Maushart, an independent scholar from Australia who coedited with Carolyn Weibe the 2021 collection of Nystrom’s writings titled The Genes of Culture: Towards a Theory of Symbols, Meaning and Media, Volume 1, added that Nystrom had a “sparse and scattered publication record” and instead focused her energies and talents on being a teacher. “Teaching was her vocation and the students that she nourished were the messages she sent out into the world,” Weibe shared.Canadian scholar David Olson of the University of Toronto presented a riveting talk that elaborated on the generative work of Ong and his classic 1982 text, Orality and Literacy, which contrasts the “psychodynamics” of the mind formed in an oral culture with that formed in a literate one. McLuhan scholar Bob Logan, also of the University of Toronto, discussed McLuhan’s general theory of media and “his success in developing a revolutionary way of studying media and technology.” Gerald Erion of Medaille College reported on his adaptation of the ideas of Postman for an undergraduate critical thinking seminar. An insightful paper by Marcelo Capello Martins, a graduate student at Pontifícia Universidade Católica, sought to hybridize the political philosophy of Arendt with Ellul’s ideas about propaganda.Several presentations focused on the pandemic’s sudden transformation of education from a classroom experience to an online event. Matt McGuire of the University of New Brunswick, Canada, reflected on the “large-scale investments in digital technology as tools to safely educate during the pandemic” and questioned “how this new teaching environment might be reshaping ways of knowing.” Ellen Rose, also of the University of New Brunswick, Canada, considered “some of the potential teaching and learning benefits and challenges, and shifting power dynamics that may arise as instructors strive to maintain academic excellence and integrity, and administrators strive to maintain profit.” Drawing on the argument in the award-winning book co-authored with Carmine Tabone, The Arts and Play as Educational Media in the Digital Age (2020), this author [Robert Albrecht of New Jersey City University] discussed the importance of hands-on experiences in the arts and interpersonal forms of play as a counterbalance to the huge influence of digital media in the lives of children.Given the political instability in both Brazil and the US, it wasn’t surprising that several panels raised questions relating to digital platforms and their impact on journalism and the future of democracy. Claudia Montenegro of Pontifícia Universidade Católica discussed how digital platforms “are inaugurating a new form of journalism which tends to ignore historical, cultural, and political values, central to the production of the news.” Ekaterina Budnik of Moskow State Linguistic University observed that, “with the advent of social media and the internet, false news reports have become more common.” Budnik then described the main patterns of spreading fake news and how to identify them. For Andrey Mir of York University, Canada, “the harm caused by fake news is overrated. The real issue coming from the media environment is polarization…Contemporary polarization is a media phenomenon enabled in social media and the news media by the very design of the business model.”In the end, the online conference provided a diverse commentary on the interrelationship of media, mind, and society during a time of dystopic rumblings and social anxieties. Next year’s conference is once again scheduled to be held in person in Rio de Janeiro (July 7–10, 2022) with hopes that the pandemic will have been brought under control by that time. The theme for that conference is “Celebration.” In the call for papers, the association explains that “A long period of turmoil has seen social division, self-isolation and perpetual stress become our daily norm… (I)t has been the strength of our relationships and associations that have sustained us.”1