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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As McLuhan averred in Understanding Media: Extensions of Man: “The ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” (McLuhan, 1964, p. 8). Along similar lines, as previously noted, he wrote in his Media is the Massage with coauthor Fiore: “All media work us over completely. They are so persuasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage” (McLuhan and Fiori, 1967, p. 26).

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A major framework media ecologists often use to describe how media alter consciousness is that of figure and ground. Arising out of Gestalt psychology, this perceptual organizing scheme refers to the tendency that media environments ← 18 | 19 → impose on people to foreground some feature of reality and to place some other aspect of that reality in a receding position, in the background. The figure is the item we think we are attending to—the content—but the ground, or the medium, may exert more potent influence on our consciousness. In actuality, they are not independent of each other. On a subconscious level, the ground works as a force of influence upon our perception of what is figured, what is in the foreground;

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Postman (1992, 1994) was attuned to how electronic culture—namely, television—fostered an outlook that privileges immediacy, emotional engagement, and technological solutions with their images and sounds while the print and oral paradigms that it began to engulf had insisted on lines of thought and had fostered delayed gratification, rational thinking, and coherence (Ramos, 2000, pp. 52–53).

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Heidegger (1977) spoke of how modern technology exerts its own mode of consciousness, naming it a “challenging-forth” mode of revealing. Technology affects Dasein: a person’s “being-in-the-world.” Identifying efficiency as a chief component of this mode of consciousness of modern ← 19 | 20 → technology, he wrote that it changes the way we look upon reality (Waddington, 2005, pp. 568–569);

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Ong was sensitive to the modes of consciousness wrought by orality, both the orality that preceded literacy and the orality that followed literacy, which he called “secondary orality.” In Presence of the Word, he affirmed the primary orality as the mode of existence most closely attuned to the divine and saw the secondary orality, arising in the 1960s, which carried a “heavy oral residue” (Ong, 1967, p. 99), as potentially capable of restoring “sonic consciousness” (Ong, 1982, p.

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Ong (1982) saw the transformations of discourse from oral to written as leading to an attendant transformation in the cognitive processes of cultures, in restructuring thought (p. 99). He felt that the consciousness shaped by print had become so internalized that it became impossible for us to recognize the psychodynamics of literacy as a conditioned mode of awareness (1982, p. 82; Zimmer, 2005, p. 6).

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He pointed out, for instance, how the reflective process in writing slows down the communicator and isolates him or her from an audience as compared to the oral performer, who communicated in the midst of auditors. The writing process, said Ong, “encourages growth of consciousness out of the unconscious” (1982, p. 150). Such shifts in modes of consciousness and structures of thought were the focus of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s study as well. She saw the rise of print as catalyst for fundamental changes in “modes of cultural production and social consciousness” (Attwood, 1980, p. 189).

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A percept is unencumbered by mental prefabrications but, instead, is wide-open alertness to patterns and connections. Patel observes that “[m]any of McLuhan’s greatest insights were derived from abandoning all assumptions and preconceptions, relying only on percepts—unmediated perceptual impressions—to discern connections” (Section 6, para 2, n.d).

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Some media ecologists suggest that the effects amount to a shift in emphasis from one human faculty to another. Such effects can be labeled effects on the human sensorium: the order of human faculties existing as an organic whole. Havelock argued that in the rise of Greek civilization, “the eye supplanted the ear as the chief organ” and along with this shift came other changes: [C]hanges from identification and engagement to individualization and disengagement, from mimesis to analysis, from the concrete to the abstract, from mythos to logos. With the growing emphasis on the visual eye comes the growing development, even birth, Havelock argues, of the personal “I” (Keller and Grontkowski, 1983, p. 209). ← 21 | 22 →

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Perhaps the biggest area that draws the attention of media ecologists is on how the technology-consciousness dynamic affects social organization and culture, as was a principal concern of Innis (Carey, 1967, p. 16). Even pleasure aroused through performances of minstrels could be viewed as an “instrument of cultural continuity” (Havelock, 1963, p. 157.) Some sought to understand precisely how the instruments and products of technology conditioned society. A famous case in point is Boorstin’s conceptualization of “pseudoevents”—certain manipulation of actual events through the devices of technology that distort cultural consciousness:

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pseudoevents are in some respects the opposite of the propaganda which rules totalitarian countries (Boorstin, 1971, p. 263–264).

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Media ecologists seek to arouse Dasein, in the Heideggerian sense: a consciousness of our consciousness, of being in the world (“European Graduate School”). Korzybski has described the liberating effects of becoming conscious of our mental forms of abstracting: “If we can devise methods to increase our ‘consciousness of abstracting,’ this would eventually free us from the archaic, prescientific, and/or ← 22 | 23 → Aristotelian limitations inherent in the older language structures” (1951,

Note: Ultimate aim of education [e]

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“Technology” is used as a catch-all term here to encompass objects both broader and narrower than mere physical apparatus. At the broadest level, it can refer to economic currency or language systems. Innis wrote about economic and cultural systems while Korzybski and Langer wrote about semantics and symbolic representation. At its narrower level, it can refer to a specific apparatus such as a television or a hand-held communication device.

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media ecologists focus on that vehicle that functions as an environment that shapes human consciousness. And the media ecologist attends to the formal properties of that vehicle—how it organizes and conditions interpretations of reality—beyond its content, meaning, or uses (Kellner, 1996, pp. 6–7). Media ecologists explore the ecological dimension of technology. Havelock, for example, examined the noetic qualities or mental activity that verbal technology prompted:

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Communication technology […] is an extension of thought, of consciousness, of man’s unique perceptual capacities. Thus communication media, broadly used to include all modes of symbolic representation, are literally extensions of mind (1967, p. 7).

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For the last two centuries industrialization has been preparing the way for it, but it is only in the last thirty years that technology has begun to impose itself everywhere, to change everything, to take over all social activities and forms, and to become a true environment” (Ellul, 1989a, p. 133).

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Havelock noted shifts from the Homeric to the Platonic phases of communication;

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Mumford might be regarded as among the earliest hard technological determinists, characterizing industrial technology and “the megamachine” as posing a major obstacle to communal being and even to life itself (Blake, 1991, p. 189). Ellul, too, ranks among the hard technological determinists in media ecology, certainly among the canonical figures, arguing about the deleterious effects of rapid changes in technology. Postman seemed to hold to a ← 25 | 26 → similar conviction in deriding the harmful effects of television and the proliferation of information. Others, instead, are more nuanced in assessing causes and effects of technology, typically recognizing that culture is comprised of multiple factors, of which technology functions as one. Even Postman, in a nod to McLuhan, held that the effects of media are not inescapable: We trust it is clear that we are not making the typical, whimpering academic attack on the media. We are not “against” the media. Any more, incidentally, than McLuhan is “for” the media. You cannot reverse technological change. Things that plug in are here to stay. But you [sic] on study media, with a view towards discovering what they are doing to you. As McLuhan has said, there is no inevitability so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening (Postman, 1969, p. 11).

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whose shoulders should the effects of media lie—the inventors of technology or the users? Postman charged media ecologists with a sort of middle management task of offering orienting principles to the function of technology in shaping thought: It is not so important that inventors know what they have created. It is important that the rest of us do, for without such understanding we are adrift in a technological sea without maps or compasses, and no sense of our destination: that is to say, without any awareness of our controlling ideologies. I do not say it is easy to know what are the ideological biases of new technologies. It is not even easy to say what are the ideological biases of old technologies. But I believe it is the task of those who study media to speculate on the matter and thereby possibly discover some compass points (1990, p. 67).

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an inheritance from Aristotle, is that its morality rests in its application. McLuhan, for example, steered clear of assigning moral power to technology, dwelling in the realm of observation of phenomena not on the matter of moral implication: My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant (1987b, p. 300). Such a view empowers the human agent, the user of the machine, with moral agency.

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Ellul charged that an audiovisual technologized society had undermined, or “humiliated,” verbal communication and therein degraded the human condition

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Christians summarizes Ellul’s contention that the uncritical glorification of technological progress, and the prizing of efficiency as a supreme value, across several spheres of society has trumped moral purpose: In Ellul’s terms, modern society has sacralized the genius behind machines and uncritically allowed its rampaging power to infect not just industry, engineering, and business but also politics, education, the church, labor unions, and international relations. Unable to establish a meaningful life outside the artificial ambiance of a technocratic culture, human beings place their ultimate hope in it. Seeing no other source of security, we tend to become slaves to technical productivity. Moral purpose is sacrificed to technological excellence (1998, p. 67). ← 27 | 28 → Ellul termed the larger social order, not merely technology or techniques, that ranks technology as sacred and that prizes efficiency above all else “la technique,” and he sought to emancipate people from its dehumanizing effects. Postman, too, admonished against the reflexive enchantment with all-things technological.

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Building a Bridget to the 18th Century he wrote: “There is even one group who seeks meaning in the ingenuity of technological innovation. I refer to those who, looking ahead, see a field of wonders encapsulated in the phrase “the information superhighway” (Postman, 1999, p.4). His formulation of the concept of “technopoly” parallels that of Ellu’s “la technique.” He characterized technopoly in a book by that same title: [T]he culture seeks its authorisation in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology. It is characterised by a surplus of information generated by technology, which technological tools are in turn employed to cope with, in order to provide direction and purpose for society and individuals (Postman, 1993, pp. 71–72). Nevertheless, even Postman saw the relative benefits of technology as a trade-off, calling it a “Faustian bargain”: Technology giveth and technology taketh away. This means that for every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The disadvantage may exceed in importance the advantage, or the advantage may well be worth the cost” (1998, Section 2, para 1). For Postman, the biggest worry seemed to be that costs and benefits of technology were occurring unawares to people employing the instruments. Like the proverbial frog in the slow-boiler, people can be embracing media forms and formats unconscious of the effects they might be exerting on them, which could in time overtake them: “Invisible technology” works subversively but powerfully to create a new way of doing things, a classic instance of the tail wagging the dog. […] When a method of doing things becomes so deeply associated with an institution that we…

Note: Tie this to my Apple Vision Pro essay

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“What the new script may have done in the long run was to change somewhat the content of the human mind […] (Havelock, 1999, p. 54). Likewise, Mumford (1934) argued that technology reorients consciousness: Behind all the great material inventions of the last century and a half was not merely a long internal development of technics: there was also a change of mind. Before the new industrial processes could take hold on a great scale, a reorientation of wishes, habits, ideas, goals was necessary” (1934, p. 3). He saw a connection between changes in the physical environment and changes in the human mind: “a shift in the whole point of view[…]” (Mumford, 1959, p. 531). The media ecological perspective that Mumford proffered broke new ground, departing from the perspective of human beings as simply tool-using animals and underscoring the role of language and formal symbolism—“technology” in media ecology parlance—in transcending the limitations imposed by immediate physical environment (Williams, 2002, pp. 142–143).

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Postman, for example, coined the term “technopoly” to describe a state of mind in which a culture looks to technology to authorize and to dictate its actions and even to solve its most pressing dilemmas. Technopoly is an uncritical mindset that technology is an unmixed blessing: unmitigated testimony to superhuman achievement (Postman, 1992, pp. 71–72). McLuhan suggested that such a mindset might be unavoidable in electronic technology, which imposed a kind of servitude on users of its technology: Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its ← 29 | 30 → nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electronic technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive[…]. No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier (1964, p. 68).

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means by which technology enslaves people is through its distortion of consciousness of time of space. Strate observed in Carey’s media ecology, for instance, “that we have moved from keeping time to serving time, that a genuine sense of time is missing from our collective consciousness” (2007, p. 177).

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Carey, on the other hand, declared the change wrought through the particular technology of the telegraph to be transformative, deterministic in its means of communicating and on our ways of thinking about communication: The telegraph […] not only altered the relation between communication and transportation; it also changed the fundamental ways in which communication was thought about. It provided a model for thinking about communication—a model I have called a transmission model—and displaced older religious views of communication even as the new technology was mediated through religious language. And it opened up new ways of thinking about communication within both the formal practice of theory and the practical consciousness of everyday life (1989, p. 204).

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Eisenstein grapples with the changes to Western culture ascribed to print technology. She saw the effects of the Gutenberg press, unlike the technical innovations in mining, paper production, and power machinery, whose effects were gradual and evolutionary, as decisive but also sometimes contradictory. To her, the printing press was itself “a complex social process that brought revolutionary change to Western culture” and “generated a revolution in cultural ← 31 | 32 → production” (Attwood, 1980, pp. 189–190).

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Orality-literacy scholars and those who chronicle the history of technology note the disturbance in balance of the senses with the advent of phonetic writing. McLuhan described phonetic writing as involving only the eye, in which “semantically meaningless letters are used to correspond semantically meaningless sounds” (1965, p. 83). “The phonetically written word,” he wrote, “sacrifices worlds of meaning” (p. 83). Innis argued that the upshot of such disturbance of the ecology of the senses is the disruption of the proper order of space and time. “The balance between time and space,” wrote Innis, “has been seriously disturbed with ← 32 | 33 → disastrous consequences to Western civilization” (1971, p. 76).” Such a balance of space and time was necessary to the maintenance of a stable society: A stable society is dependent on an appreciation of a proper balance between the concepts of space and time. We are concerned over control not only over vast areas of space but also over vast stretches of time. We must appraise civilization in relation to its territory and in relation to its duration. The character of the medium of communication tends to create a bias in civilization favourable to an over-emphasis on the time concept or on the space concept and only at rare intervals are these biases offset by the influence of another medium and stability achieved (Innis, 1951,

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Some, however, maintained an optimistic outlook in believing that electronic communication was capable of restoring balance and a harmony of the senses. Carey understood McLuhan to hold such an outlook: “And, in the critical move, he assigned to electrical communication the capacity for the reassociation of sensibility: the restoration of psychic life in a balanced sensorium and of social life in a global village” (Carey, 1998, Section 1, para 12).

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An understanding of media (or technology) as “environment” distinguishes between media as apparatus or instrument from media as form, culture, economy, production, or milieu (Kellner, 1996, pp. 6–7). Ellul believed that the acceleration of development of technology had overtaken previous cultural norms and practices and supplanted them with its social order, its own environment: ← 34 | 35 → For the last two centuries industrialization has been preparing the way for it, but it is only in the last thirty years that technology has begun to impose itself everywhere, to change everything, to take over all social activities and forms, and to become a true environment (Ellul, 1989a, p. 133).

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As Angus writes: “A medium of communication thus incorporates both a technology and a series of related social identities (or subject-positions)” (Angus, 1998, p. 24). Included in Korzybski’s environmental factors were psycho-social ones: “On the human level, these would include psycho-logical, socio-cultural, etc., factors” (Korzybski, 1951, pp. 190–193).

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One of Postman’s major themes (1992, 1994) has been that the modern school is a major battleground in American culture between the competing ideologies of print literacy and electronic culture. The first ideology insists on a respect for the past, control of impulse, deferral of gratification, acceptance of prerequisites as part of the process of gaining access to complex ideas, detachment, objectivity, logic, evidence, and all the attitudes and procedures associated with reason as defined by literacy. The second ideology insists on the primacy of the present, immediate gratification, instant access to information of all kinds, emotional involvement, technological solutions to problems, and all the attitudes and values promoted by a media environment dominated by electronic, image-and-sound-based, and consumer-driven technologies, as exemplified in particular by television (Ramos, 2000, pp. 52–53).

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McLuhan suggests that when we encounter a technology for the first time, the initial shock serves as an “anti-environment” that provokes wide-eyed awareness in the user, creating a moment of revelation as old and new come into juxtaposition. However, over time the user becomes numb to the structuring effect of a technology much like one quickly becomes oblivious to the constant humming of an air conditioner in a closed room. McLuhan refers to this as the stage of autoamputation, and it is at this point where a crucial reconfiguration of the body and mind takes place (2010, p. 22). A thing does not function as an environment until it is assimilated into consciousness, when a person is unable to tell where the boundaries are. For example, when someone buys a luxury car and experiences for the first time concierge dealership service, such as a coffee bar and free car wash, the owner’s senses are aroused. At a certain point, the effects of such accommodations begin to lose their luster. And when the owner becomes accustomed to such accoutrements, they cease to impress the owner. When the experience is assimilated, it becomes environmental; it moves from being novel to liminal to normal.

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Loci of cultural investigation include personal culture, popular culture, virtual culture, technoculture, and critical culture.

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a philosophy of life is describable as a set of rules for constructing messages, and the individual’s culture or Weltanschauung, call it what you will, is built into his conventions of communication (Bateson, 1953,

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In an evolution of his earlier interests in literature, McLuhan shifted his attention to popular media (Huyssen, 1989, p. 11). His 1951 volume The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man was a close reading of “the culture of advertising” (Kingwell, 1999, p. 22). That book, uniting analysis of popular culture with literary analysis, applied the techniques of New Criticism and helped to establish the centrality of media in cultural study (Wasser, 1998, p. 146; Czitrom, 182, pp. 166–171).

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Baudrillard is among the most celebrated in media ecology. He speaks of contemporary cultures as the artificial product of communication technologies; “hyperreality” and “simulation” replace reality the way it actually exists (“European Graduate School,” para 3). The digital culture has given rise to a plethora of media ecology studies on “new media” and “new, new media.” Particularly noteworthy ones include Paul Levinson’s (2013), New New Media, Robert C. MacDougall’s (2012) Digination, and Barry Vacker’s 2015 Media Environments. Attention to memes threads some of the studies of virtual culture. Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (1976) launched several studies focusing on the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, holding that ideas are replicated in a culture in a process of imitation that is analogous to genetic transmission.

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I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind. ← 37 | 38 → The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. “Mimeme” comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like “gene.” I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is…

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Among the most controversial of studies that followed Dawkins’ book is Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine (1999), which maintains that humans’ innate ability to imitate sets us apart from other living beings and that mimesis is a key factor in why we have evolved culture. “The thesis of this book,” she writes, “is that what makes us different is our ability to imitate” (p. 3). Blackmore’s book follows in a line of books that…

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“Internet memes can be treated as (post)modern folklore, in which shared values are constructed through cultural artifacts such as Photoshopped images and urban legends” (p. 14). She identifies repackaging mechanisms by which content—and the cultural norms they transmit—is spread in digital environments. She also offers a definition of an Internet meme, distinct from Dawkins’ conceptualization, as “(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which (b) were created with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users” (p. 41). Among the examples of Internet memes that Shifman presents that meet these definitional standards, she opens her book referring to the 2012 “Gangnam Style” video, which was the first YouTube video to reach one billion viewers. She also distinguishes memes from virals: “Whereas the viral comprises a single cultural unit (such as a…

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For Innis, the role of media in distributing knowledge and power was paramount. He argued that control of culture goes hand-in-hand with control of political and economic power. Heavy and durable media such as stone concentrate social, economic, and political power in those who have those media in their control. He also maintained that media carry with them certain biases that shape certain cultural mindsets either favoring conservation of information or the rapid transmission of it (Ramos, 2000, p. 48). He was taken up with a concern for forms of cultural conditioning through various media (Kuhns, 1971, p. 158). Innis saw the imposition of bias onto culture as inherent within a given medium:

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Innis’ emphasis: “[He] saw the rise and fall of civilizations, especially empires, in terms of a dialectic between competing monopolies of knowledge based on the temporal or spatial bias” (1982, pp. 156–157).

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Havelock noted that the introduction of Greek letters into writing altered human culture, separating it from societies prior to it (1999, p. 53). “It is no accident,” he wrote, “that the prealphabetic cultures of the world were also in a large sense the pre-scientific cultures, prephilosophical and preliterary” (Havelock, 1999, p. 56).

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Some media ecologists have pointed to cultural changes within the sphere of education. An implication of Eisenstein’s analysis is that schools needed to develop different systems of teaching subsequent to the spread of typography. Postman’s main interest in media ecology was born, in fact, of his concern about the competing ideologies of print literacy and electronic culture. He directed our attention to significant differences in emotional and rational processing that accompany the two paradigms (Ramos, 2000, pp. 52–53).

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“We use media to destroy cultures, but we first use media to create a false record of what we are about to destroy” (Carpenter, 1972, p. 99).

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Perhaps the most caustic critiques of technology came in Ellul’s indictment of the audiovisual technology’s “humiliation of the word,” which he maintained degrades the human condition (Karim, 2002, p. 74)

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Goody sought to understand the connection between cultural development and writing. With his collaborator, he rendered an account of the connection: [W]riting establishes a different kind of relationship between the word and its referent, a relationship that is more general and abstract, and less closely connected with the particularities of person, place and time, than obtains in oral communication (Goody and Watt, 1963, p. 321).

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Others characterize Havelock’s work as drawing a connection between discursive form (poetry) and consciousness: “In the second section of Preface to Plato, Havelock crosses his rhetorical bridge, engagingly explaining the connection between the Homeric poetic tradition and the Platonic state of mind that rests upon rational thinking” (Neeley, Magee and Enos, 1998, pp. 197–198). Innis (1971) said that some media connect societies to the past; such media as orality, books, and architecture he called time biased. Radio, in contrast, connected people to the present; they were said to be space biased. “The balance between time and space,” he wrote, “has been seriously disturbed with disastrous consequences to Western civilization” (Innis, 1971, p. 76). Carey (1998) credits McLuhan for connecting media, even ancient and contemporary ones, by their shared social effects:

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