Media ecology theory is the study of media, technology, and communication and how they affect human environments.[1] The theoretical concepts were proposed by Marshall McLuhan in 1964,[2] while the term media ecology was first formally introduced by Neil Postman in 1968.[3]
Ecology in this context refers to the environment in which the medium is used – what they are and how they affect society.[4] Neil Postman states, "if in biology a 'medium' is something in which a bacterial culture grows (as in a Petri dish), in media ecology, the medium is 'a technology within which a [human] culture grows.'"[5] In other words, "Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people. An environment is, after all, a complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving."[6]
Media ecology argues that media act as extensions of the human senses in each era, and communication technology is the primary cause of social change.[7] McLuhan is famous for coining the phrase, "the medium is the message", which is an often-debated phrase believed to mean that the medium chosen to relay a message is just as important (if not more so) than the message itself.[2] McLuhan proposed that media influence the progression of society, and that significant periods of time and growth can be categorized by the rise of a specific technology during that period.
Additionally, scholars have compared media broadly to a system of infrastructure that connect the nature and culture of a society with media ecology being the study of "traffic" between the two.[8]
^West, Richard; Turner, Lynn H. (2014). Introducing Communication Theory. New York: McGraw-Hill Education. pp. 454–472. ISBN 978-0-07-353428-2.
^ abCite error: The named reference :1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Gencarelli, T. F. (2006). Perspectives on culture, technology, and communication: The media ecology tradition. Gencarelli: NJ: Hampton. pp. 201–225.
^Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, by Marshall McLuhan, edited by Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, Foreword by Tom Wolfe. MIT Press, 2004, p. 271.
^Postman, Neil (1 March 2006). "Media Ecology Education". Explorations in Media Ecology. 5 (1): 5–14. doi:10.1386/eme.5.1.5_1.
^Postman, Neil. "What is Media Ecology?". Media Ecology Association. Archived from the original on 14 September 2013. Retrieved 2 Oct 2016.
^Hakanen, Ernest A. (2007). Branding the teleself: Media effects discourse and the changing self. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-7391-1734-7.
^Peters, John Durham (2015). "Infrastructuralism: Media as Traffic between Nature and Culture". In Näser-Lather, Marion; Neubert, Christoph (eds.). Traffic: Media as Infrastructures and Cultural Practices. BRILL. pp. 29–49. doi:10.1163/9789004298774_003. ISBN 978-90-04-29877-4.
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