Media ecology
Media ecology 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 Neil Postman in 1968.
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, "if in biology a 'medium' is something in which a bacterial culture grows, in media ecology, the medium is 'a technology within which a culture grows.'" In other words, "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. McLuhan is famous for coining the phrase, "the medium is the message", which is an often-debated phrase believed to mean that the medium chosen to relay a message is just as important than the message itself. McLuhan proposed that media influence the progression of society, and that significant periods of time and growth can be categorized by the rise of a specific technology during that period.
Additionally, scholars have compared media broadly to a system of infrastructure that connect the nature and culture of a society with media ecology being the study of "traffic" between the two.
Background
Marshall McLuhan
In 1934, Marshall McLuhan enrolled as a student at Cambridge University, a school which pioneered modern literary criticism. During his studies at Cambridge, he became acquainted with one of his professors, I.A. Richards, a distinguished English professor, who would inspire McLuhan's later scholarly works. McLuhan admired Richards' approach to the critical view that English studies are themselves nothing but a study of the process of communication. Richards believed that "words won't stay put and almost all verbal constructions are highly ambiguous". This element of Richards' perspective on communication influenced the way in which McLuhan expressed many of his ideas using metaphors and phrases such as "The Global Village" and "The Medium Is the Message", two of his most well-known phrases that encapsulate the theory of media ecology.McLuhan used the approaches of Richards, William Empson, and Harold Innis as an "entrée to the study of media". However, it took many years of work before he was able to successfully fulfill their approaches. McLuhan determined that "if words were ambiguous and best studied not in terms of their 'content' but in terms of their effects in a given context and if the effects were often subliminal, the same might be true of other human artifacts, the wheel, the printing press, the telegraph and the TV". This led to the emergence of his ideas on media ecology.
In addition to his scholarly work, McLuhan was also a well known media personality of his day. He appeared on television shows, in magazine articles, and even had a small cameo in the movie Annie Hall.
Few theories receive the kind of household recognition that media ecology received, due directly to McLuhan's role as a pop culture icon. He was an excellent debater and public speaker, but his writing was not always what would normally pass in academia.
Neil Postman
Inspired by McLuhan, Neil Postman founded the Program in Media Ecology at New York University in 1971, as he further developed the theory McLuhan had established. According to Postman, media ecology emphasizes the environments in which communication and technologies operate and spread information and the effects these have on the receivers. "Such information forms as the alphabet, the printed word, and television images are not mere instruments which make things easier for us. They are environments – like language itself, symbolic environments within which we discover, fashion, and express humanity in particular ways."Postman focused on media technology, process, and structure rather than content and considered making moral judgments the primary task of media ecology. "I don't see any point in studying media unless one does so within a moral or ethical context." Postman's media ecology approach asks three questions: What are the moral implications of this bargain? Are the consequences more humanistic or antihumanistic? Do we, as a society, gain more than we lose, or do we lose more than we gain?
Walter Ong
was a scholar with a master's degree in English who was once a student of McLuhan at the Saint Louis University. The contributions of Ong standardized and gave credibility to the field of media ecology as worthy of academic scholarship. Ong explored the changes in human thought and consciousness in the transition from a dominant oral culture to a literate one in his book Orality and Literacy.Ong's studies have greatly contributed to developing the concept of media ecology. Ong has written over 450 publications, many of which focused on the relation between conscious behavior and the evolution of the media, and he received the Media Ecology Association's Walter Benjamin Award for Outstanding Article for his paper, "Digitization Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of Writing and Today's Computers".
North American, European and Eurasian versions
Media ecology is a contested term within media studies for it has different meanings in European and North American contexts. The North American definition refers to an interdisciplinary field of media theory and media design involving the study of media environments. The European version of media ecology is a materialist investigation of media systems as complex dynamic systems. In Russia, a similar theory was independently developed by Yuri Rozhdestvensky. In more than five monographs, Rozhdestvensky outlined the systematic changes which take place in society each time new communication media are introduced, and connected these changes to the challenges in politics, philosophy and education. He is a founder of the vibrant school of ecology of culture.The European version of media ecology rejects the North American notion that ecology means environment. Ecology in this context is used "because it is one of the most expressive language currently has to indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter". Following theorists such as Felix Guattari, Gregory Bateson, and Manuel De Landa, the European version of media ecology presents a post-structuralist political perspective on media as complex dynamical systems.
Other contributions
Along with McLuhan, Postman and Harold Innis, media ecology draws from many authors, including the work of Walter Ong, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Félix Guattari, Eric Havelock, Susanne Langer, Erving Goffman, Edward T. Hall, George Herbert Mead, Margaret Mead, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and Gregory Bateson.Core concepts
Assumptions of the theory
- Media are infused in every act and action in society.
- Media fix our perceptions and organize our experiences.
- Media tie the world together.
McLuhan's media history
Marshall McLuhan defined media as anything requiring use of the human body. Under this definition, both computers and clothing can be identified as media. When a media is introduced it is adapted to human senses so that it becomes an extension of the individual, and its capabilities influence the whole of society, leading to change. McLuhan states that there are three inventions that transformed the world: the phonetic alphabet, by virtue of its ability to make speech visible, which McLuhan argues gave rise to the discipline of rhetoric in ancient time and to the study of language and poetics, which was also known as grammar. The printing press in the nineteenth century and the telegraph led to both the modern newspaper and also to journalism as an academic pursuit. The introduction of broadcasting in the form of radio, following on the heels of mass circulation newspapers, magazines, as well as the movies, resulted in the study of mass communication. Due to these technologies, the world was taken from one era into the next. In order to understand the effects of symbolic environment, McLuhan splits history into four periods: the Tribal Age, the Literacy Age, the Print Age, and the Electronic Age.McLuhan states that, in order to study media effectively, one must study not only content but also the whole cultural environment in which media thrives. He argues that using a detached view allows the individual to observe the phenomenon of the whole as it operates within the environment. The effects of media - speech, writing, printing, photograph, radio or television – should be studied within the social and cultural spheres impacted by this technology. McLuhan argues that all media, regardless of content, acts on the senses and reshapes sensory balance, further reshaping the society that created it. This differs from the viewpoints of scholars such as Neil Postman, who argue that society should take a moral view of new media whether good or bad. McLuhan further notes that media introduced in the past brought gradual changes, which allowed people and society some time to adjust.