MEDIA ECOLOGY

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?

What is media ecology? Media Ecology Association answer

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