Media, Ecology; Media Ecology
About environmental approach to media
What connotations does the word environment bring to your mind? Does it trigger thoughts about fresh air or pollution? Maybe it’s Greenpeace that makes the first association with reference to it. I want to put an emphasisis on the FACT that envirinment is about interaction (and, as interaction is so closely related to communication, I could say environment is about communication, but I’m not going to go that far in this post). What’s the relation between media and environment? Well, media ARE our environment, and the evidence for that thesis is provided by an interdisciplinary character of media studies. One could say media are not our natural environment. And that is true. But to what extent are we still “natural” creatures? Well, to a certain extent, of course, we still are, yet the acceleration of technological change pushes us towards expantion of our cultural “face”, and media are the most dynamic “layer” of contemporary culture. An animal symbolicum has never been that much “mediated“. Media create our cultural environment, and as an educationalist, I cannot refrain myself from posing a question to what extent this environment is human friendly, or (using trendy “nomenclature”) ecological . Today I’d like to attract your attention to the concept of media ecology, and one of its originators Neil Postman (enjoy 
).
Useful reading: What is Media Ecology?
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About
Name: Beata Godejord
Education: Pedagogy of Culture
Title: PhD in Humanities major in Pedagogy
Area of work: Media Pedagogy
Area of interest: Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Semiotics, Visual Culture
This blog contains my reflections and work within the field of: a) education (whatever it means), b) media (approached as cultural “products” and cultural factors), c) relation between media and education (quite broadly understood). It is a kind of ABC on this and that, mostly meant for students, although everyone with an interest in a), b), c) is welcome.
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Recent
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Links
Hi Beata. Welcome to Media Ecology!
I would add to your introduction that in our analysis of culture, we Media Ecologists consider the biases regarding time and space of a medium and what attitudes, beliefs and institutions those biases encourage. Harold Innis would have noted whether a medium has permanence and therefore enables communication over time, or is portable and therefore encourages communication over space. This frame of reference has been amended by Walter J. Ong who noted that the salient feature of any human culture is whether it is completely or primarily oral and shapes it cultural institutions around the oral/aural transmission of information or is literate, possessing a means of writing down and transmitting information through sight.
Marshall McLuhan would have added that any technology can be investigated in a four-fold manner. What does it enhance? What does it obsolesce? What does it retrieve that had been lost? What does it reverse into when pushed to an extreme?
I keep a blog “A Model Media Ecologist at http://www.robertkblechman.blogspot.com/ where I consider these and other related topics. I welcome your comments.
Bob Blechman