In GoogleMeet today, we start by understanding the term 'media ecology' and explore some of the main ideas presented by Marshall McLuhan and Don Tapscott. You have been emailed two documents, which you save in a new desktop file entitled MEDIA ECOLOGY.
As we look at these ideas and theorists, it is useful to bring to mind what is happening in the media world at the moment.
For example, President Trump has this week been banned from Twitter, FB and Instagram: why, and is it a good or bad thing? Why has Jack Dorsey the CEO of Twitter himself expressed concerns? What is the relationship between freedom of expression and social media?
Consider the ways in which the technology of communication has changed in your lifetime / your parents' time / your grandparents' time. Apart from the benefits of your smart phone, what are the downsides? Consider issues like addiction, distraction, sleep interruption, 'never off' scrolling, social disruption, 'never-ending' workday, threats to personal privacy as photos are in the public domain, spam, loss of vital data, health problems, surveillance, theft / crime, conflict minerals, peer pressure, living vicariously... in no particular order.
Why is the Online Harms Bill 2021 considered necessary?
Marshall
McLuhan - Technological Determinist - 1964
No single individual is more central to media
ecology than McLuhan, not because he was the first to employ this perspective,
but rather because he popularized the perspective, and produced the first great
synthesis of media ecological thought.
McLuhan was viewed
as a Technological Determinist in that he viewed technology shaping
us, rather than viewing people dictating how the technology will be
used.
Clark,
D.R. (2004). History of Knowledge. Retrieved from
http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/history_knowledge/mcluhan.html
Marshall
McLuhan (1911-1980) foresaw the approaching changes in that it would bring
about a new society characterized by greater connectivity and networking:
Whereas in
the mechanical age of fragmentation leisure had been the absence of work, or
mere idleness, the reverse is true in the electrical age. As the age of
information demands the simultaneous use of our faculties, we discover that
we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved, very much as with
the artists in all ages - Marshall McLuhan in Understanding
Media: The extensions of man (1964).
McLuhan was
viewed as a Technologically
Determinist in that he viewed technology shaping us, rather than
viewing people dictating how the technology will be used.
He is
probably most famous for declaring that the medium is the real message (Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964). Later, McLuhan and Quentin Fiore wrote and illustrated
the ability of media to “massage” a message or content (The
Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, 1967):
The message
of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it
introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or
transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and
enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of
cities and new kinds of work and leisure. This happened whether the railway
functioned in a tropical or northern environment, and is quite independent of
the freight or content of the railway medium. Understanding Media, N. Y.,
1964, p. 8)
However,
later in life, he came to a different conclusion. In Paul Saettler's The
Evolution of American Educational Technology (1990, p.
274), Saettler writes, “During the last years of his life, McLuhan changed
some of his earlier ideas. He became less certain, for example, in ascribing a
causal link between media and personal perception. Where he once saw the human
being as a passive responder to media, he came to believe that individuals are
active creators of their own environments.”
Saettler
further writes that McLuhan's provocative pronouncements stimulated much of the
creative thought that we now have about media. Thus, the medium is simply the
carrier, while what we do in or through media are the real promoters of
learning. Get the learning methodology correct and the media, rather it be
large classrooms, small group activities, or asynchronous eLearning will simple
be a vehicle for transporting that methodology to the learners.
The Tetrad (Four laws of media)
In his later
years, and partially as a response to his critics, McLuhan, along with his son
Eric, wrote Laws
of Media: The New Science (1988), in which he develops a scientific basis for his thought
around what he termed the tetrad— four laws for looking at our culture,
framed as questions, to a wide spectrum of humankind's endeavours. He
postulates that all media exhibits these four types of effects:
- Enhancement or extend: new
media provides improved performance over the old
- Obsolescence: new
media renders previous models passe
- Retrieval: new
media contains existing elements from the cultural inventory
- Reversal: we
tend to overdo the new until we run out of benefits and into detriments
Thus, four
questions may be asked of any new media or technology:
- “What does it extend?” — For
a bicycle, it would be the foot, for a phone it would be the voice.
- “What does it make obsolete?”
— The bicycle makes walking obsolete, and the phone makes the telegraph
unnecessary.
- “What is retrieved?” — a
bicycle allows travel, while a phone allows a sense of community.
- “What does the technology
reverse into if it is over-extended?” — An over-extended bicycle culture
longs for the pedestrian lifestyle, and the over-extension of phone
culture engenders a need for solitude and face-to-face conversations. An example, please, class?
This is a
fairly important concept for it allows us assess the cause and effects of new
technologies. For example, elearning:
- Intensifies multimedia
presentation as a form
- Renders classroom training as
obsolete
- Retrieves many elements of
training
- Is reversing itself into a blended
approach for greater flexibility
The Internet:
- Intensifies the speed of
access and networking Open
University, FutureLearn,
Centre of Excellence
- Makes distance and print
monopolies obsolete JSTOR,
online resources, news, citizen journalism
- Retrieves media such as text
and pictures
- Is reversing into obsession
with data and information overload
Don Tapscott –
Four principles for the open world - 2012
TedTalk https://www.ted.com/talks/don_tapscott_four_principles_for_the_open_world#t-43365
What does
Tapscott mean by ‘openness’? (There is a transcript)
·
1.Collaboration; idea of agora
(open market) to orchestrate capability; in the sense of the boundaries of
organizations becoming more porous and fluid and open.
·
2. Transparency is about
the communication of information; letting in the sunlight; institutions are no
longer naked
·
3. Sharing:
embracing the commons is about giving up intellectual property, for example, IBM giving
4 hundred million dollars of software to the Linux movement which then gave
them a multi-million dollar payoff.
·
4. Empowerment
The distribution of Knowledge, Power: the age of networked intelligence decentralisation.
The Arab Spring & new media; how mobile phones triangulated the positions
of government snipers killing unarmed students in the streets during the
Tunisian revolution; how Twitter in Syria saved lives;
Digital native / the net generation
Twelve Themes
of the New Economy - 1996
Don Tapscott
has written about the impact of digital networking on our economy. In The
Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence (1995) and
in a more recent book, Growing
Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (1998), he
forecasts the coming influence of the demographic of wired kids born since
1978. The key technology is the I-way:
Just as the
highway system and electrical power grid were the infrastructure for the
industrialist economy, so our information networks will be highways for the new
economy.
- Don Tapscott
The Twelve Themes of the New Economy (1996)
At the heart
of Tapscott's analysis are twelve themes which differentiate the new economy
from the old:
- Knowledge is
everything — from smart clothes to smart roads.
- Digital not
analog — email, not post office.
- Virtual means
physical things can become virtual — from virtual ballot boxes to the
virtual job.
- Molecularization of old
organizations are replaced by dynamic clusters of individuals.
- Internetworking through
clusters networks rather than hierarchies.
- Disintermediation of the
middle functions between consumers and producers are being eliminated
through digital networks.
- Convergence
Computing, communications, and content industries are converging to become
the leading economic sector.
- Innovation
Obsolete your own products. If you don't do it first, your competitors
will... If it ain't broke, break it before your competitors do.
- Prosumption through
customization combining production and consumption.
- Immediacy becomes
a key driver — just in time is everything.
- Globalization with
transnational systems.
- Discordance issues
are rising due to as unprecedented social conflicts.
Neil
Postman
https://quizlet.com/3734017/media-ecology-theory-flash-cards/
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
(1985)
No media
ecologist outside of McLuhan himself has enjoyed Postman’s success as a writer.
Postman was also the founder of the media ecology program at New York
University. In this, his best known book, he both explains the perspective
(under the guise of media epistemology) and uses it to critique the role of
television in contemporary American culture. Amusing Ourselves to Death is one of the most
frequently cited works in the media ecology literature, this is also the final
work in Postman’s television trilogy, complementing Teaching as a Conserving Activity
(1979) and The
Disappearance of Childhood (1982).
What Is Media Ecology? (Neil Postman)
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.
- It structures what we can see
and say and, therefore, do.
- It assigns roles to us and
insists on our playing them.
- It specifies what we are
permitted to do and what we are not. Sometimes, as in the case of a
courtroom, or classroom, or business office, the specifications are
explicit and formal.
In the case
of media environments (e.g., books, radio, film, television, etc.), the
specifications are more often implicit and informal, half concealed by our
assumption that what we are dealing with is not an environment but merely a
machine.
Media ecology
tries to make these specifications explicit.
It tries to
find out what roles media force us to play, how media structure what we are
seeing, why media make us feel and act as we do.
Media ecology
is the study of media as environments.
—Neil
Postman, “The Reformed English Curriculum.” in A.C. Eurich, ed., High
School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education (1970)
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together (2011)
Turkle
provides an incisive critique of AI and robotics, and social media, based on
interviews and observation. This book was followed up by Reclaiming
Conversation in 2015.
TedTalk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGFWLdEbvOY
