Media ecology—as an intellectual tradition in understanding the symbiotic relationships among culture, communication, and technology—evolved into being from a multitude of academic disciplines since the beginning of the ecological movement in the 1800s.

Note: re: media ecology of X, the essay - internet culture, essays emerging in blogs, and platforms/models

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media ecology is a theoretical perspective on understanding media as physical, sensorial, perceptual, and symbolic environments or structures within which people’s sense-making experience manifests itself through and in communication. That is, it seeks to shed light on how changes in communication technology may facilitate social and cultural changes, and vice versa.

Note: not content or economics, architecture, as a place

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Lewis Mumford, Eric Havelock, Harold Innis, Walter Ong, Jacques Ellul, Marshall

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The gradual rise of media ecology as a theory group in the past twenty years has been the result of ongoing contributions in teaching and research by a loose network of like-minded colleagues from multiple disciplinary as well as institutional backgrounds, namely, those associating themselves with the Toronto School, so-called in part due to its deep-seeded intellectual heritage tied to the work by the like of Edmund Carpenter, Eric Havelock, Harold Innis, and McLuhan at the University of Toronto; scholars from the research tradition set forth at St. Louis University, the home base of Ong, one of media ecology’s paradigm thinkers; graduates from the doctoral program at NYU under Postman or “the New York school,” a number of whom found their academic home at institutions in the New York Metropolitan Region and elsewhere; and so on.

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There is yet another very significant aspect of Professor Cali’s book that is worthwhile of special mention, in that it is written as an introductory textbook specifically for graduate students and upper-division undergraduates who may find having some grounding in the field useful. If and when widely adopted as such, then the book would likely help in the mainstreaming of media ecology. In the sociology of knowledge, standard textbooks have long played a pivotal role in educating future generations of students, scholars, and practitioners as well as helping to legitimize the “normal science” of the subject or field of study in question.

Note: the purpose of textbooks

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Basing upon these discussions, Professor Cali offers his readers a sets of tools he calls “heuristics” distilled from each major theorist’s work as a means to assist them in “doing” media ecology, the focus of the book’s final section. In it, Dr. Cali guides the readers through a process of applying the heuristics from these theorists or paradigm thinkers—such as McLuhan’s tetrad, Postman’s “5 things,” Ellul’s “Psychological Crystallization”; he also talks about doing media ecology without such heuristics, such as exploring “new” media ecologists. ← xii | xiii →

Note: pattern language?

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In addition, it is similarly important that what we learn about and from media ecology can help us relate to the challenges and opportunities ← xiii | xiv → in human communication in our own everyday life in an increasing mediated world. In other words, to the media ecologists, living media ecology is just as important as studying and doing it.

Note: not just thoery; virtue

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McLuhan and Fiore (1967) taught us that media “work us over completely” and “are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered” (1967, p. 26).

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With this book, I want to lift the human agent out of the cyborg human-technology conceptualization and to locate the human agent as front and center. I also want to reclaim the human agent, in that location, as principally an intersubjective being, working out his or her existence first and foremost intermingled and engaged with other intersubjective beings, technology, and other tools functioning in service of or working against that primary operation. Human beings use technology the way we use the natural environment, but that does not make us techno-beings. People ultimately have the choice to put technology to their own purpose; they are not hopelessly bound to every technology that taunts or titillates.

Note: p2p environments

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Media ecology aficionados may see the adoption of the metaphor of the map as a nod to Alfred Korzybski, whose phrase “the map is not the territory” is part of field lexicon of media ecology. Or they may think of Jean Baudrillard, whose view is that “the map is the territory” or that it precedes the territory. Either way, the title “fits” with the intellectual territory of media ecology. But my primary reason for adopting the metaphor of mapping is grounded in my more ardent interest in offering an almanac, an overview, a map to encourage media ecological exploration and discovery.

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And how is different from other forms of media studies?

Note: typo

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I have organized the sections on each media ecologist within each section into three areas: (1) I present the influences upon each figure’s thought, emphasizing biography on some more than others when the biography appears particularly “environmental” to the media ecologist being discussed; (2) I sketch the respective figure’s scholarly contributions to media ecology, and (3) I highlight a selection of key critical components—“heuristics”—that each respective media ecological figure has left us. This “Heuristics” area is a special feature of the book; it is intended to offer intellectual scaffolding to those interested in furthering work along the path each respective pioneer has set. Other texts, which are edited volumes, have profiled the general approaches of these figures; this text equips readers with critical apparatuses for exploring their own media ecological interests, for conducting their own media ecological inquiries. The sections on heuristics are not intended to substitute for reading the complete works of the scholars presented in this text that are related to media ecology but to spur the reader to read actual texts from which these heuristics were derived.

Note: background, contributions, pattern

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Fourth, Scolari says that the term “ecology” taps into certain philosophies of science underlying systems theory, cybernetics, and chaos theory, endorsing a broader philosophy of holism. Fifth, the term places the locus of investigation at the environment, searching out particular environments that give rise to culture and various forms of consciousness. Sixth, it also brings a particular perspective to the study of environments—that of viewing the technology that creates environments as extensions of the human person. Seventh, its characteristic way of analyzing technologies is not that of investigating media effects in a causal, linear fashion but rather that of viewing technology, culture, people, and environments in terms of interrelationships, their symbiotic relations. Eighth, Scolari ascribes a certain social function to media ecology: “a general concern with preserving and repairing the world….” This is to say that to study a rupture or imbalance in the ecology is implicitly to call for its restoration.

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Lance Strate recalls the early days: I began the media ecology Ph.D. program in 1980, and was immediately impressed by the approach they took, which was a great books approach. Some of the students thought that reading a book a week was too much, but I drank it all in. The first semester of the doctoral seminar, none of the books had anything at all to do with media in the conventional sense. Instead, we read about perception (Adelbert Ames, R. L. Gregory), information and cybernetics (Norbert Wiener), systems theory (Ervin Laszlo), the study of language and symbolic communication (C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, Postman and Weingartner, and Susanne Langer), general semantics ← 5 | 6 → (Wendell Johnson), nonverbal communication (Edward T. Hall), consciousness (Julian Jaynes), symbolic interaction (George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman), and relational communication (Paul Watzlawick and Stanley Milgram). Much of this corresponds to what is otherwise known as communication theory, but there was a sense of depth and connection that I don’t think you could find elsewhere. In the second semester of the doctoral seminar, we finally got around to studying McLuhan, Innis, Mumford, Ellul, Ong, Boorstin, Havelock, I. J. Gelb’s book about writing systems, books by Lynn White and Jean Gimpel on medieval technology, Elizabeth Eisenstein on the printing press, and Postman’s latest (which was Teaching as a Conserving Activity then). And for that entire year, Neil Postman and Christine Nystrom team taught the seminar, and started it at least an hour and a half early because the two hours it was assigned was just not enough time for discussion. It was a heady experience, to say the least, and an exceptional foundation (Ralon 2010).

Note: make bibliography

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Among the most familiar conceptualizations of media ecology to those who write about media ecology is the notion that it is the study of media as environments. McLuhan codified this notion in a 1967 essay, in which he equated media with environments and drew an analogy between those who study media and those who study natural environments: It is now perfectly plain to me that all media are environments. As environments, all media have all the effects that geographers and biologists have associated with environments in the past. Environments shape their occupants (McLuhan, 1967, p. 27). McLuhan was not the first to adopt the metaphor of the environment to capture the interplay of people and technology. Lewis Mumford cites Scottish biologist Patrick Geddes’ studies of the natural environment of plants, animals, and humans as a major influence on his own media ecological studies and for “laying the ground for a systematic ecology of human culture” (Novak, 1995, p. 25).

Note: consider geography as part of ecology;

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Underlying such a view is that human beings stand at the center of a media environment ← 6 | 7 → that shapes their consciousness. Within this mediated “ecosystem,” various media interact, overtake, replace, or distinguish each other as they move toward some kind of balance in that system as experienced by people (Anderson 2013). Walter Ong’s (1967) notion of the human sensorium, and of a “shifting sensorium,” holds this same perspective: changes in the media ecosystem affect changes in human consciousness.

Note: utopian architects constantly trying to find the lever for social change yet failing; yet we have ample examples of how media shapes an individual; media is mord symbic, more adaptable, and with mass meda its influence as obvious; interesting how 20th century arch failurea coincide with rise of a non-tectonic mass media; also consise ornament as media

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Such self-referencing citation practices encircle intellectual ground, assuring a transmission of knowledge and instantiating norms of cultural identity that become the heritage of the media ecology discipline. Also, the high visibility of certain disciplinary figures, such as journal editors or association presidents, accord legendary status to scholars active in an emerging discipline. Numerous other shared practices and cultural customs mark media ecology as a discipline already in existence (p. 351). Besides the reiterative nature of the field, other features that mark it as a discipline include its probative method of inquiry and the existence of its own professional association (that also collaborates with other associations sharing similar interests); professional journal, and a publishing program that sustains shared interest. ← 7 |

Note: discipline anchkred in citation

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The distinguishing trait of a meme is the duplication or recurrence of some initial instance. Memes tend to be synthetic in nature: snapshots of some larger idea or narrative. When ideas about memes as a concept emerge, those ideas reach the meta-level, leading us to speak of a metameme: a meme about a meme. One can think of media ecology as one large meme about many memes: a metameme. The relatively stable set of recurring ideas—environment, figure-ground, sensorium, consciousness—and recurring methods—probes, tetrads, historical comparison, pattern recognition—circulate, and persist in a coterminous relationship that mark them as a recognizable and repeatable entity. Media ecology, as such, can be understood as a complex of interlacing ideas that function collectively to refer to a general perspective on the interacting changes in technology, culture, and consciousness. The perspective functions like an intellectual movement that seeks to make sense of the rapid changes we are living through in these areas.

Note: find old notes on metameme: immunity from all memes

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what is a media ecology ← 8 | 9 → perspective? Some might say that the entire media ecology enterprise is itself a distinct perspective on the role of media in shaping consciousness. Strate (2004) has acknowledged that from the beginning, the term has been used to indicate, among other things, “a perspective or approach” (p. 19). The perspective might be characterized principally as one of pattern recognition in which phenomena catch the attention of the media ecologist and are understood vis-à-vis other phenomena. Such a perspective, the ability to recognize patterns in the interaction of media, culture, and consciousness can be trained. It “reveals the grounds of perception, against which the figure of concentration stands out” (Morrison, 2006, p. 174). Media ecology, then, is the study of the interrelationship of people, media, culture, and consciousness, and of the changes that occur among them, and of their symbiotic alteration of human environments. It attends especially to changes within and among these elements that touch off changes in the larger ecology. Media ecology also explores previous scholarship that attempts to describe and explain facets precipitating, accompanying, or following those changes.

Note: on understanding the medium and the incentives of the maker; its the theoretical deconstruction of media power, in marketing, propagnda, and technopoly, each who are not just players in the ecology, but active shapers

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You will remember from the time when you first became acquainted with a Petri dish, that a medium was defined as a substance within which a culture grows. If you replace the word substance with the word technology, the definition would stand as a fundamental principle of media ecology: A medium is a technology with which a culture grows; that is to say, it gives form to a culture’s politics, social organization, and habitual ways of thinking. Beginning with that idea, we invoked still another biological metaphor, that of ecology. In its origin, the word has a considerably different meaning from how we use it today. As found in Aristotle, it meant “household.” Aristotle spoke of the importance to our intellectual equanimity of keeping our household in order. Its first use in its modern meaning is attributed to Ernst Haeckel, a German zoologist, in the late nineteenth century. He used the word as we do now, to refer to the interactions among the elements of our natural environment, with a special emphasis on how such interactions lead to a balanced and healthful environment. We put the word “media” in the front of the word “ecology” to suggest that we were not simply interested in media, but in the ways in which the interaction between media and human beings give a culture its character; and one might say, help a culture to maintain symbolic balance. If we wish to connect the ancient meaning with the modern, we might say that the word suggests that we need to keep our planetary household in order (Postman 2000, pp. 10–11).

Note: technology + economics + governance are the substrate from which cultutres, subcultures, and countercultures form. i think the AI cranks, typically romantics, dont see how the new affordances make the romantic vision more xrealzable than ever. they dwell on one facet of a commercial substrate, slop, the front crest of a first wave, with no imagination to the ocean behind it

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some media ecologists argue that the introduction of a new technology, particularly one that comes to dominate a culture, a society, or an era, transforms the environment, affecting how people process information, how they think, and how they relate. Gordon offers his own analogy to explain the ecological dimension of media ecology: And whenever you introduce a new species into a physical environment you put, let’s say a wolf, reintroduce it to the forest of North America, you don’t have the previous environment plus a wolf. The change is ecological. Once the wolf is there he’s the predator of some animals and he’s predated by others and so as a consequence the whole forest is simply a different thing. It’s not the previous forest plus a wolf. And so also when culture introduces new media, they are not the previous culture plus the new media; they are a different culture all together” (Gordon interview, 2011, no page). ← 10 | 11 →

Note: how does the medium of AI shift internal cognitive modes?

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The scope of media ecology extends from hieroglyphics to haiku, from the spoken word to the digitized image, from lyceum lectures to iPhone pings. While typically those human inventions are media in the conventional sense of that term, media ecologists have also taken up concerns about the city, modes of transportation, symbol systems, and economic systems. The media ecologist explores how a given medium—broadly or narrowly construed—shapes the environment that shapes how people perceive, think, and…

Note: media vs medium

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Levinson (2000) underlines the importance that communication had in Marshall McLuhan’s thinking: McLuhan’s work was startlingly distinct from the others in that he put communications at center stage. Indeed, in McLuhan’s schema, there was nothing else on the stage. Everything was communication. In Understanding Media (1964), he considered at least as many technologies as did…

Note: arch as communication

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We could say that media ecology practically accompanies human evolution. But the Ancients undertook more formal study when Plato, for example, contemplated how writing, as compared to oral communication, might alter perceptions of reality. In the early twentieth century, with print materials having been broadly distributed for centuries and as radio and television began to spread frequencies across the world, McLuhan cultivated interests in two scholars who today are considered pillars in the field. McLuhan taught at Saint Louis University in Missouri, while the young Jesuit Walter J. Ong was there as a student (1938–1941), undoubtedly influencing the thought of the orality-literacy scholar. Yet as a topic of research, media ecology—though not yet named that—germinated at the University of Toronto in the early 1950s when McLuhan, Harold Innis, ← 11 | 12 → Edmund Carpenter, and their collaborators sought to extend their nascent studies of media…

Note: plato as origin is a reminder that writing has its own branch of media ecology; consider five tiers: word, pen, typewriter, computer, AI

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For a detailed history of the field, I commend especially the following works. The first one is a monograph by Lance Strate published as a special issue of Communication Research Trends called “A Media Ecology Review” (pp. 3–48), revised and extended in his 2006 text Echoes and Reflections: On Media as a Field of Study. Secondly, a full-bodied history and overview of the field appears in Casey Man Kong Lum’s 2006 edited volume Perspectives on Culture, Technology and Communication. In particular, Lum’s opening chapter on “Notes Toward an Intellectual History of Media Ecology” (pp. 1–60) provides an historiography of the field, sketches its early institutionalization, and outlines the field’s underlying theoretical propositions. Thom F. Gencarelli’s chapter within that text, “Neil Postman and the Rise of Media Ecology” (pp. 201–254), presents phases of the work of Neil Postman, including that which gave rise to the development of the field. Another homage to Neil Postman that also recounts and reviews the origins of media ecology is Lance Strate’s 2014 book Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World Revisited. Besides offering a biographical essay on Postman, it also details Postman’s development of the field at New York University. In addition, two general interest media ecology sites offer rich historical and other contextual information on the field: Laureano Ralon’s Figure/Ground website (figureground.org) and the Media Ecology Association’s homepage (http://www.media-ecology.org/).

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As one gains familiarity with the history of media ecology, one notices that throughout the field evolution, ideas are frequently presented in relationship, as part of some overall complex or system. Frequently, they appear in ← 12 | 13 → tandem, often in juxtaposition. Examples include McLuhan’s “figure-ground” and “hot-cool”; Ong’s “primitive” and “civilized” peoples; McLuhan and Ong’s “extension-interiorization”; Carey’s “ritual and transmission”; Boorstin’s “hero/celebrity”; and, more broadly, the field’s rival emphases on historicity (on changes in technology and consciousness) and intensity (incongruous focal moments).

Note: a media-ecology dictionary as a subset within my dictionary; specialized vocab

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In Technics and Civilization, Mumford (1934) anticipates systems theory, introducing the term “technical syncretism” (p. 107), which is akin to the concepts of synergy, emergence, or the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Note: linked to B Fuller?

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perhaps the most distinguishing feature of media ecology suggested by these dyads is that media ecology seeks above all balance in the human-media ecology. To point to polar ends is to seek balance. Tilting in one direction draws attention to that from which it is tilted and toward a center at which an idealized point of equilibrium would be established. McLuhan and Ong seem caught up with exploring the effect each medium has on the human sensorium and, implicitly, with restoring a certain balance of the senses altered by the introduction of new media. Whenever binaries are invoked, whoever invokes them hearkens back to the same primary theorists. The use of such binaries helps thus to establish these theorists as canonical figures. ← 13 | 14 →

Note: selctivism as retuning the balance

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