Media ecology

Overview

"Media ecology" refers to the discipline within communications studies that examines how the technology of communication, that is, the dominant media at a particular era, shapes and sustains that cultural environment, creates the conditions under which that environment defines itself and evolves until the next stage of communication technology emerges. At its introduction, of course, new technology momentarily dazzles and intrigues; but inevitably people accommodate themselves to the convenience of the technology and it then becomes simply a part of who they are and how they live (Gow 2010).

Unlike other inventions of convenience—the lightbulb or the airplane, for example—communication technologies are invasive and domestic and come to define a person's most intimate environments. Borrowing their metaphor of an ecosystem from the environmental sciences, media ecologists examine how communication itself actually creates a culture—communication is not merely a vehicle, a way to move information effectively and efficiently; rather communication and its technologies play a dominant part in the evolution of human history. Humanity, as it turns out, is the product of its communication technologies.

Like any ecosystem—a rainforest, for example, or a tundra or a desert or a backyard—culture is itself a massive, dynamic entity, a complex, open but nevertheless tightly structured environment of messages, signs, and symbols (alphabet, numbers, images) being transmitted by communication technologies across and through the community. Whatever the message, whatever the information being passed, what is critical is the method for transmitting that information—that "how" creates the human community. Across nearly two hundred thousand years (only about five thousand of which have been recorded), as the communication technologies evolved, so has that human community. It is the dynamic interaction between people and their communication technology that fascinates media ecologists.

Until the era of electronic communications beginning in the late nineteenth century, the evolution from one communication technology to the next was gradual, often measured across many centuries. For this reason, communications theorists were reluctant to assume communication technologies as a prominent element in cultural change. Humans invented new technologies to improve message relays—scientific evolution defined as almost inevitable the development of increasingly more sophisticated communication technologies. They were, however, merely elements of a culture defined and shaped by the people within that culture. With the rapid movement from radio technology to the advent of television and the unprecedented emergence of image technologies within a single decade (the 1940s) and the sudden reality of something called a global community, communications theorists began to study more closely the relationship between people and their communication systems. Television (and movies for that matter) seemed to have far more power to impact and change people than, say, a radio or a telephone or a book. Television seemed poised to become an instrument of change, a communication system capable of redefining its culture or engendering an entirely new one.

People who spent a growing amount of time immersed in the world of their television screens lived different lives from those who did not have such technology, their understanding of the world was different, their codes of conduct were different. People who watched television differed in some ways from those who listened to radio or those who read. Researchers began to explore whether television was more than a medium for information and entertainment. Electronic communication had an undeniable immediacy, an availability, a direct impact on a wide sweep of people that radically altered how people defined all of the concepts critical to a culture. If communication systems such as television impact viewers' perceptions, their lifestyles, their codes of behavior, then the question was whether such communication systems themselves could direct the larger culture's core virtues and values. The idea that humanity, under the massive and irresistible sway of television, seemed to move from creating their communication technology to being enslaved by it was at once intriguing and terrifying.

The concept of media ecology was initially formulated in the early 1960s even as television was expanding its reach. The John F. Kennedy assassination was the first major news event carried largely live by network television and was followed shortly by the shooting of the prime suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of a Dallas police station. Because Oswald's murder took place in front of television cameras covering his arrest, it was broadcast live to millions of viewers. Communication theorists, most vocally Marshall McLuhan (1916–1980), a Canadian academic and long-time student of the evolution of communication systems back to pre-linguistic tribal cultures, began to investigate the implications of television's massive reach. He began to formulate a radical theoretical model that suggested media itself shaped a culture, not the other way around. Once the technology existed, its impact in turn shaped a new kind of culture, a new kind of individual simply by virtue of being a part of that wider communication environment.

According to this theory, a person brings a television into their homes for a variety of reasons only to end radically altered because of the TV's irresistible and invasive influence. There was no going back—humanity could not un-invent television. In McLuhan's famous dictum, "the medium is the message" expressed his conclusion that the information being moved, whether in print or on the radio or on television, was unimportant—what mattered was how that information was relayed. The message and the medium were essentially the same.

In 1968, American Neil Postman, a controversial communication theorist and outspoken critic of television, coined the term "media ecology" as a way to describe how communication technology changed the people within a culture, how it actually impacted how people live, think, and act. As McLuhan told Playboy magazine in a now-classic 1969 interview, "Effective study of the media deals not only with the content of the media but with the media themselves and the total cultural environment within which the media function."

That theoretical model, of course, would have no way of anticipating the explosive impact of digital technologies beginning less than a decade later and dominating international communications within a scant fifteen years. The computer, then the Internet, then social media, and then the radical reconception of the telephone into a powerful handheld mobile computer enabling a global communication system together created a global, technology-based culture. Digital communication systems appeared to confirm both McLuhan's and Postman's visions: Computerized communication systems have already begun to reshape people and their perceptions of themselves, others, and the world around them.

Applications

The key to media ecology is scale. Indeed, to appreciate the implications of digital technology and the short- and long-term consequences of this radically new communication medium is to first appreciate the sheer reach of the media ecologists' vision. For media ecologists, the smartphone did not happen in a vacuum but rather as a part of an evolutionary narrative that dates to prehistory. Media ecologists are more than media critics. Rather, media ecology takes up McLuhan's dictum and seeks to understand the roles of media in a media-shaped, media-derived, media-driven culture (Valcanis, 2011). Hence, media ecologists are nothing less than communication historians; any era is a continuation of earlier eras, human history is a linked evolution scheme. Media theorists are quick to acknowledge theirs is a field of study that cannot, indeed will not conceive of any single technology media as somehow the ultimate and final evolution in human communication; the Internet will undoubtedly give way to a more efficient, more accessible, more everything system.

However, media ecologists divide the history of human communications into five broad eras. In each era, media ecologists argue, the dominant communication technology created the era's defining social, political, economic, and cultural identity. For nearly five hundred thousand years, prehistoric humanity was illiterate, or rather preliterate. Early communication systems created tightly bound tribes concentrated in particular areas where their basic needs—food, shelter, and water—could be provided. Humanity came to see the need and value of recordkeeping as a way to organize communities and provide those networks with some reliable continuity. The movement into the basic codes of recordkeeping—the alphabet and the number system—have been traced to roughly five thousand years ago. Equipped with writing systems such as the alphabet—a complex system of message delivery and storage—societies produced records and generated the need for some archive system to keep those records; storytelling as well moved from orality to writing.

It was the invention of the moveable printing press and the widespread availability of the printed word in the fourteenth century that defined the next media ecology. Literacy—reading and writing—became a more common skill, as the medium, the printing press, made accessible and comprehensible the system of squiggles and lines and spaces. Cultures developed pride in their own national languages; governments created vast networks of information storage; as machines helped create a new sense of leisure, the technology created a widespread interest in reading religious literature, scientific treatises, political manifestos, and works of the creative imagination. With the emergence in the mid-nineteenth century of practical and workable electronic gadgets that made communication more efficient and more accessible than ever conceived—most prominently the telegraph, telephone, radio, and ultimately television—communication technology called into question entrenched conceptions regarding national boundaries and identities and created the first indications of a global community. This evolution continued with the introduction in the mid-twentieth century of digital communications systems and the Internet and the exponential growth of computer technology.

From grunts to an alphabet to a printing press to a telephone to a smartphone, media ecology strives to comprehend humanity's complex relationship with its own communication systems. According to media ecology theorists, the communication technology of each era ultimately creates the morality, the ethics, the behavior patterns, the protocols for community bonding, social skills, economic classes as well as the distribution of wealth, access to education, even individuals' sense of identity and self-worth.

Issues

What most intrigues media ecologists is the profile that communication technologies create within their era, that is, the sort of person who is shaped by the dominant medium of the era. Initially, media ecologists agreed that the medium itself was neutral; technology itself is created entirely to make more efficient and more accessible increasingly larger volumes of data. Media ecologists weighed both the positive and negative impacts of the technology, particularly since the new millennium and the enormous impact of computer technology, and have begun to argue that communication studies need a broad moral dimension. As Grosswiler (2016) argues, media ecologists simply cannot afford to be morally neutral. Television, for instance, increased the awareness of a person's own era, created an environment for entertainment, generated interest in news and sports, and provided its users with an unprecedented opportunity to see the world they shared. Television as well diminished social skills, divided families into individuals sharing the same screen but oblivious to each other; television desensitized users to the realities of pain and even death; television marginalized reading skills; television coopted time children and adolescents might have used for school work, socializing, even athletic endeavors. Indeed, television has been indicted for a range of unintended consequences. Media ecologists, however, do not blame technology for creating a culture; rather they study the ways in which individuals in a culture adapt to the communication media that sustain it.

Therein lies the most troubling charge leveled against media ecology, the implication that communication evolution and its impact on human society is a foregone conclusion. Smartphones, for example, have been observed to undermine social interaction skills among users; the question, then is whether the damage is inevitable and unavoidable. Critics resist the assertions of media ecologists, that once a technology is in place, its impact is locked in as well. Rather they seek to ameliorate or counter the doomsday predictions that follow observations by communications researchers—that reading was essentially doomed when radio was invented; that neighbors and families were doomed once televisions became a staple in homes; that privacy and the charm of distance were doomed when the Internet was born. Media ecologists, of course, reject such philosophical posturing as ultimately irrelevant; more like scientists, they define conditions, gather data, and then chart the intricate ways that communication technology and the messages it packages and delivers shape a culture and define consciousness and moral awareness within that culture.

Bibliography

Gow, G. (2010). Marshall McLuhan and the end of the world as we know it. English Studies in Canada36(2): 19–23. Retrieved March 12, 2024 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=61775361&site=ehost-live

Grosswiler, P. (2016). Cussing the buzz-saw, or, the medium is the morality of Peter-Paul Verbeek. Explorations in Media Ecology 15 (2), 129–139. https://doi.org/10.1386/eme.15.2.129‗1

Hildebrand, J. M. (2018). Modal media: Connecting media ecology and mobilities research. Media, Culture & Society, 40(3), 348–364. Retrieved March 12, 2024 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=128421607&site=ehost-live

Hildebrand, J. M. (2022). What is the message of the robot medium? Considering media ecology and mobilities in critical robotics research. AI & Society, 37, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01204-1

Islas, O., and Bernal, J. D. (2016, October 11) Media Ecology: A Complex and Systemic Metadiscipline. Philosophies, 1(3), pp. 190–198. doi.org/10.3390/philosophies1030190

Knosala, B. (2017). Media ecology in Gliwice: About two projects realized by department of applied social science (Silesian University of Technology) and museum in Gliwice. Scientific Papers of Silesian University of Technology. Organization & Management / Zeszyty Naukowe Politechniki Slaskiej. Seria Organizacji I Zarzadzanie, (110), 91–100. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=125868850&site=ehost-live

Trevisan, F., Hoskins, A., Oates, S., & Mahlouly, D. (2018). The Google voter: Search engines and elections in the new media ecology. Information, Communication & Society, 21(1), 111–128. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2016.1261171

Valcanis, T. (2011). An IPhone in every hand: Media ecology, communication structures, and the global village. ETC: A Review of General Semantics 68 (1), 33–45. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=59858899&site=ehost-live