International Mass Communication essay

1

Introduction

1.1. Life, the Universe, and Everything

What does it mean to be human? What are the conditions that shape and in- fluence us as a species? How does human communication, consciousness, and culture change over time, and in concert with the changing circumstances in which we find ourselves? What drives human history? What defines the present moment? And what might the future hold for us? Most important of all, as we move forward, how are we to survive as a species? And beyond mere survival, how are we to retain our humanity in the face of changing circumstances that often seem altogether dehumanizing?

These are some of the concerns that have attracted scholars to media ecology, and that have animated our conversations, as many of us have been interested in the kinds of questions relating to, as humorist Douglas Adams put it, life, the uni- verse, and everything. Of course, the big questions are not the only questions that have been discussed in media ecology circles. There is ample room for the pursuit of more modest concerns and specific topics, for research regarding a given his- torical moment, or culture or subculture, or text, artifact or technological innova- tion. But even media ecological studies that are relatively narrow in focus can be

Introduction

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situated in a much broader context that accords them much greater significance than such studies would otherwise enjoy.

My aim in writing this book is to provide an introduction to media ecology that will serve both readers who are new to the subject and those who enjoy a great deal of familiarity with it. For several decades I have been called upon repeatedly to answer the question, what is media ecology? My answers over the years have var- ied somewhat, in part depending on the situation and audience, in part because my understanding has grown and evolved, by which I mean that it has deepened rather than changed in any radical manner, and in part because, as the saying goes, it’s complicated.

When the question comes up in conversation, I often respond by answering the question with another question, specifically, have you ever heard of Marshall McLuhan? I often follow this up by mentioning McLuhan’s famous aphorism, the medium is the message, which in many ways sums up what is meant by media ecology (a point I will elaborate on in Chapter 3). Often, I will follow up with a question about Neil Postman, and then maybe some other scholars, also adding the caveat that media ecology is not reducible to the work of any one individual. But my main point here is that one of the best ways to answer the question, what is media ecology?, is to instead answer the question, who is media ecology?, that is, whose work does the term media ecology represent? I was given the opportunity to answer that question on a broad scale, representing the field as a network of scholars and their works, when Paul Soukup asked me to write a review essay on media ecology for Communication Research Trends (Strate, 2004). I included a revised and updated version of the review in my first book on media ecology, Echoes and Reflections (Strate, 2006). I also discussed media ecology in relation to several scholars in On the Binding Biases of Time (2011), and specifically in regard to Postman in Amazing Ourselves to Death (2014), and to McLuhan in a volume published in Mandarin translation, 麦克卢汉与媒介生态学 [McLuhan and Me- dia Ecology] (2016).

The question of who is media ecology? is one that continues to be explored, and as Walter Ong (1967, 1982) reminds us, there is no knowledge without a knower, no scholarship without a scholar, and therefore no media ecology with- out a media ecology scholar, or media ecologist (a designation that was introduced in a spirit of playfulness and humor, that also allows us to include categories other than academics, e.g., artists, musicians, poets, novelists, media producers, inven- tors, entrepreneurs, managers and executives, politicians and activists, etc.). The idea of media ecology does not exist in a vacuum; it is only known to exist in a human context, so that there is no media ecology except for a media ecology of

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Introduction | 3

McLuhan, a media ecology of Postman, and so on. That these individual media ecologies may overlap to a significant degree is what makes it possible to go be- yond the scope of intellectual biography in our discussions of media ecology. But in the end we are always dealing with media ecology as it is understood by a given individual, or group.

This book, then, is my media ecology, my understanding of media ecology, and were it not for the fact that it would defy the conventions of contempo- rary publishing, the proper title of this book ought to be My Media Ecology or Lance Strate’s Media Ecology. Lest you get the wrong impression and think that in making this statement I mean to claim ownership of media ecology, or other- wise indulge in some form of self- aggrandizement, let me assure you that that is not the case. I fully acknowledge that my understanding of media ecology is an exercise in what Alfred Korzybski (1950, 1993) termed time- binding, building on the work of others that have gone before me, standing on the shoulders of giants as it were. My understanding has also been influenced by colleagues and contemporaries, and most certainly by my students. But I take pains to qualify this work as my own so that none of the defects it unavoidably contains will be ascribed to these others. Most importantly, I want to emphasize that my purpose is not to impose my understanding on others, or to claim that this is the last word regarding the subject matter. As Edward Wachtel, my friend, colleague, and collaborator (Strate & Wachtel, 2005) has observed, anonymity in authorship is directly related to the aura of authority, which is why dictionary definitions come across as if they were the word of God (Wachtel, 1992). And that is why I want to emphasize that this book represents my media ecology, in hopes that in this way I will avoid conveying an impression of absolute anonymous authority over these writings, although I do hope that they are given serious consideration. Moreover, following the advice of Korzybski and others associated with general semantics, I should also add that this book represents my media ecology circa 2016, because I fully anticipate that my understanding of the subject will continue to grow and evolve for as long as I am alive and lucid.

I do hope that my understanding of media ecology, as conveyed through the medium of this book, will be helpful for others in gaining their own understanding of media ecology, and in continuing that work as scholars and practitioners. I also hope that this book, while providing a leg up in understanding media ecology, in no way short circuits further study, but rather, demonstrates its absolute necessity. Living within an electronic media environment, there tends to be an emphasis on speed and instantaneity, and even among scholars working within an older, bookish tradition, there is often a desire for quick learning, shortcuts to knowledge acquisi-

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tion. No doubt, under some circumstances, a superficial understanding of the kind to be gained from a Wikipedia entry may seem sufficient, even given a certain degree of inaccuracy in its coverage. It may also be the case that under other circumstances the sudden flash of insight that many associate with understanding media ecology, that aha! moment, is sufficient for their purposes. But I would suggest that media ecology scholarship is in many ways quite challenging, a form of scholarship that requires a long term commitment, but also one that is, ultimately, quite fruitful.

Media ecology scholarship can be hard, but I hope that this book will make it a little bit easier, by providing a clear and accessible introduction to the subject. Rather than producing a survey of the field, as I have done before, my intent is to provide a summary of what I consider to be media ecology’s foundational concepts. I probably should add that this is not a textbook, as much as I might want it to be adopted as a required text for various kinds of courses. A textbook is a particular genre of publishing designed exclusively to serve a pedagogical func- tion. Indeed, textbooks may be considered the first modern form of educational technology, and holding aside differences of opinion on their value, their purpose and function is to present students with a faithful reflection of scholarship as it exists in a given area of study. And that is not my intent for this book. Rather, my objective is to go beyond existing scholarship, and provide a new synthesis, one that advances media ecology scholarship. For this reason, I believe that this book will have some value even for seasoned media ecologists.

1.2.   Defining Media Ecology

What is media ecology? A better question would be, what is the definition of media ecology? Even better would be, what are the different definitions of media ecology that have been put forth at various times, by various individuals? With that in mind, my starting point is the first definition of media ecology that accompanied the formal introduction of the term in an address delivered by Neil Postman. The context was the 58th annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, held in Milwaukee, during a program session entitled Media Ecology: The English of the Future, on November 29, 1968. Postman’s address was listed as, “Growing Up Relevant,” and a revised version of Postman’s address was published in 1970 as a book chapter under the new title of “The Reformed English Curriculum” in an anthology entitled High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Second- ary Education, edited by Alvin C. Eurich. It is here that Postman (1970) defined media ecology as “the study of media as environments” (p. 161). As this is the Ur-

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text as far as any formal discussion of media ecology is concerned, it would seem altogether appropriate to review it here.

Postman (1970) began by arguing that the subject of English has become largely irrelevant, having very little survival value, and that “children need to be competent in using and understanding the dominant media of their culture” (p. 160). He went on to refer to novels, poems, and essays as older types of media that serve as the content of English education, and then suggested an alternative that would better prepare students to function in an age when we have developed the capacity both to leave behind the confines of the planet via space travel, and to destroy it, via nuclear weapons:

I call the alternative “media ecology.” Its intention is to study the interaction between people and their communications technology. More particularly, media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understand- ing, feelings, 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. (p. 161)

While other attempts at defining media ecology have followed, this first definition remains, in many ways, the most useful, and serves as the starting point for this book. Postman’s definition is based on two analogies. The first may be taken as a metaphor, that media can be understood as environments. The second analogy is with the traditional definition of ecology as the study of environments, from which it follows that media ecology would be defined as the study of media as environments. As an analogical definition, it is suggestive rather than precise, and therefore does not convey in any detail what exactly media ecology is. In this sense, Postman’s definition can be taken to be deliberately subversive, informed by Korzybski’s (1993) warning that, “whatever you might say something ‘is’, it is

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not” (p. 409). Indeed, the fuzziness of the definition lies in the fact that the terms are left relatively open to interpretation, reflecting the complexity of what they represent, and the fact that more specific definitions would inevitably be oversim- plifications.

All definitions are constructed out of other terms that in turn require their own definitions, based on other terms that require their own definitions, and so on. The process is ultimately circular, and dictionaries are closed systems, which is why it is impossible to use a dictionary unless you already know the language it represents. I bring this up not to argue that any attempt at defining terms would be futile, but rather to note the limitations and difficulties of such activities. At this point, I simply want to emphasize that Postman’s definition is dependent on two key terms, media and environments. Both terms are words that are commonly used in everyday discourse, which may lead to the assumption that no formal defi- nition is required, their meaning being widely shared. This would be a mistake, however. In the context of media ecology, both terms take on special meanings.

The term media, when used in a fairly conventional sense, refers to what we might call the usual suspects, television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, and now the new media, social media, mobile devices, etc. Postman (1970) does not provide any sort of operational definition of media, and at first glance his us- age seems fairly conventional insofar as he equates media with “communications technology” at the start of the passage quoted above. But there is also a hint that he is referring to other phenomena as well, for example in his reference to novels, poems, and essays as media, and in equating books, radio, film and television with courtrooms, classrooms, and business offices. Further into the address, he brings up the effects of medical and aerospace technologies, and touches on the topic of technology in general, as phenomena to be studied by media ecologists. Postman’s use of media as a key term is based on McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964), and McLuhan uses the terms media, technology, and language more or less interchangeably. I will discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 5, but here, suffice it to say that the term media refers to a much broader array of phenomena in the context of media ecology scholarship than it does elsewhere.

As for the other key term, environments, Postman (1970) refers to them as complex message systems, echoing Norbert Wiener’s remark that the world “may be viewed as a myriad of To Whom It May Concern messages” (quoted in Watz- lawick, Bavelas, & Jackson, 1967, p. 258). In this instance, Postman’s influences can be traced back to Claude Shannon’s information theory (Shannon & Weaver, 1949), as well as Wiener’s (1950) cybernetics, and the further elaboration of cy- bernetics by Gregory Bateson (1972, 1979) as it evolved into systems theory.

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This certainly points to a different understanding of the term environments than is commonly used. For this reason, I think it important to emphasize that Post- man’s (1970) definition could actually be reversed to reveal an important and too often unacknowledged aspect of what media ecology represents: the study of environments as media.

1.3. The Study and the Object of Study

Media ecology is defined as a particular kind of study, the object of that study be- ing environments, as well as media. In this formulation, there is a clear distinction between the object of study and the study itself, just as there is a distinction be- tween the environments that organisms inhabit as an object of study, and ecology as the study of those environments. As a result of the environmental movement that emerged during the 1960s, it has become common for the term ecology to do double duty as the object of study as well as the study itself. That is, ecology became synonymous with environment, especially when referred to as the ecology. Substituting the ecology for the environment served to underline the fact that the environment is not a static object, but rather a dynamic process involving inter- dependent parts.

The term media ecology has undergone a similar mutation since its introduc- tion in 1968, especially during the 1990s, with the popularization of the internet. In part, this may be a reflection of references to the ecology in popular discourse, in part it is due to the diffusion of the phrase media ecology and its adoption by individuals with little or no awareness of its origins. References to the media ecol- ogy, the new media ecology, and media ecologies can be found in academic work in which media are the object of study, but these studies often are not media ecologi- cal. Journalists and writers for the periodical press also use the phrase on occa- sion, generally in reference to the interaction of different media, for example, the ways in which streaming video over the internet poses a challenge to traditional broadcasting, or how independent bloggers pose a challenge to newspaper organi- zations. McLuhan (1964) acknowledges this kind of phenomena, noting that the introduction of television after the Second World War forced radio to redefine itself as a medium. But this is very much a minor point, tangential to McLuhan’s central arguments about how media affect communication, consciousness, and culture. Certainly, there may be interest in the question of how different media interact with one another for anyone concerned with the media industries, and media ecology scholars may take up that question, but it is at best a secondary

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concern, a far cry from the life, the universe, and everything type of questions that are often associated with media ecology scholarship. Moreover, this other usage of media ecology is based on common sense definitions of media, rather than the broader understandings of medium associated with media ecology scholarship.

Of course, media ecology scholars are not prohibited from referring to the object of their study as the media ecology, or some particular variation such as the digital media ecology. After all, some terms refer to both the study and the object of study, such as history, education, and communication. For the sake of clarity, however, and also because the phrase media ecology has been adopted in areas of intellectual and popular discourse that are disconnected from media ecology scholarship, I believe it best to use terms like media environments to refer to the object of study. An alternate definition of media ecology, then, might be the study of media environments. Again, this defers the question of defining media ecology onto the question of defining media environments, but I prefer the study of media as environments (and environments as media) because media environments are some- times differentiated from communication environments, symbolic environments, information environments, or technological environments, not to mention bio- physical environments. I will return to this point (in Chapters 4 and 8), but first, however, a brief discussion of the origin of the term media ecology is warranted.

It is perhaps a reflection of our post-literate culture that there has been some controversy within the media ecology community over who first came up with the term, in other words, who first said the words media ecology within the context of informal conversation, or possibly a seminar discussion. The problem is that, in the absence of any documentation, there is no way to determine who first uttered the phrase, so that any claim to have done so originally cannot be verified, and could easily be mistaken due to faulty memory or the possibility that someone else had actually said the words at an earlier point in time. In all probability, it happened more than once, perhaps a number of times, that someone thought of the phrase media ecology for what seemed to be the first time, or was the first time for them, and for others present at that moment. This is why coinage, as the term implies, is associated with printing, and publication. As far as I can determine, the first time the term media ecology appeared in print was in the program for the 1968 NCTE meeting that listed Postman’s “Growing Up Relevant” address, in which he formally introduced the term. Some of the confusion that came up in later decades is due to the fact that Postman at times attributed the coinage to McLuhan, in part to give the term greater legitimacy; I have detailed my efforts to uncover the origins of the term in Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World Revisited (2014). Suffice it to say that while McLuhan did not

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coin the term, he certainly did inspire it, and utilized ecology and environment as metaphors in Understanding Media (1964), but in doing so, followed the example of others who had gone before him, such as Lewis Mumford (1934) and Patrick Geddes (1904, 1915).

I think it important to add that when Postman (1970) introduced media ecology in 1968, he only took credit for coining the term, stating that, “the first thing to be said about media ecology is that I am not inventing it. I am only nam- ing it” (p. 161). He then went on to explain that there are at least 20 living me- dia ecologists, specifically Buckminster Fuller, Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, Peter Drucker, Herman Kahn, David Riesman, Ray Bradbury, Harold Lasswell, Don Fabun, Walter Ong, Edward T. Hall, Paul Goodman, Lynn White, Jr., Reuel Denney, Ronald Gross, Ashley Montagu, and Edmund Carpenter, as well as ap- proximately 12 media ecologists who were no longer alive, specifically naming Edward Bellamy, Harold Innis, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Norbert Wiener, and Alfred North Whitehead. While the list of names would change, and espe- cially expand over the years, the idea of answering what is media ecology by asking who is media ecology would remain.

1.4.   Field of Inquiry, Field of Study

In addition to introducing and defining the term media ecology, Postman (1970) described it as a field of inquiry, which he contrasted to a subject:

Media ecology is a field of inquiry. Fields of inquiry imply the active pursuit of knowl- edge. Discoveries. Explorations. Uncertainty. Change. New questions. New methods. New terms. New definitions. A “subject” implies replicating, memorizing, ventriloquiz- ing someone else’s well- established answers to someone else’s well- formed questions. A field of inquiry implies “a finding out.” A subject implies “a parceling out.” That is why, in the school of the future, subjects (as we usually think of them) will have very little value. The school is no longer a viable medium for communicating what is already known, and hasn’t been for at least quarter of a century. (p. 163)

Postman’s views on the value of schooling changed over time (i.e., Postman, 1979, 1995), but the important point is the contrast between a subject and a field of inquiry. Both involve study, an activity that Ong (1982) notes was not possible before the invention of writing. The kind of study that Postman associates with a subject, with its well- established answers and well- formed questions, corresponds to what is otherwise referred to as a discipline. That term’s root meaning of instruc-

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tion and knowledge has a longstanding association with punishment and a strict emphasis on order that certainly fits the rigidity of Postman’s notion of a subject. It shares the same origins as disciple, which means student or follower, and carries that same sense of replicating, and maybe even memorizing and ventriloquizing, as opposed to independent thinking.

In contemporary academics, discipline refers to a well- established subject, one that has a widely accepted cannon, introductory curriculum, theories, methods, etc. A field is often contrasted to a discipline, as being defined not by any estab- lished body of knowledge, but by mutual interest in a particular topic. For this reason, a field is generally understood to be interdisciplinary in nature. As a field, media ecology may be described as interdisciplinary, drawing upon not only all of the social sciences and humanities, but the fine arts and hard sciences as well. Interdiscipinary and interdisciplinarity have become buzzwords in contemporary higher education, and media ecologists may gain some advantage from this, hav- ing suffered from the bias against interdisciplinarity in the past. I cannot help but observe, however, that a significant portion of what is referred to as interdiscipli- nary work may more accurately be referred to as nondisciplinary, by which I mean ungrounded in any real sense of scholarly method. Or to put it in plain and vulgar terms, bullshit. This echoes critiques that have been made by media ecology schol- ars such as Postman (1995, 1999) and Camille Paglia (1990, 2000), and nota- bly Henry Perkinson (1996), who discusses the creation of a risk- free intellectual world, one in which criticism, let along falsification, is difficult if not impossible. To be clear, I am not arguing that this is true of all interdisciplinary scholarship— far from it. It just leads me to suggest the field of media ecology might better be characterized as multidisciplinary, as scholarship in our field does require the use of multiple disciplines rather than a complete abandonment of all disciplinarity.

Whether media ecology is described as an interdisciplinary or multidiscipli- nary field, it is worthwhile noting that field itself is a metaphor, one related to area (as in area of study) in using space as a metaphor for topic, itself a subtle metaphor, as the root meaning of topic is place and space, as in topography, topology, topiary, etc. Spatial metaphors can be traced back to the culture of ancient Greece, de- rived via alphabetic literacy (Ong, 1982), and the ability that writing affords us to rearrange and organize knowledge visually and categorically, in spatial arrange- ments on a writing surface or page. The use of field may also be an agricultural metaphor, as education has often been associated with sowing seeds, germinating ideas, with cultivation (another agricultural metaphor, as is culture itself ) of the intellect, growth, and of course with the fruits of knowledge (not to mention the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden’s Tree of Knowledge). In fact, field has

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many relevant connotations, including a field for farming— as noted, scholar- ship also requiring toil and labor with the aim of producing food for thought; a field of play, for athletics, games and contests— intellectual activity can be quite competitive, or as Ong (1982) puts it, agonistic, but also can involve a great deal of free play (Huizinga, 1955), something particularly prominent in the field of media ecology; a field of battle, or battleground, in warfare— scholarship often involves contested terrain and even vicious battles over turf and theory; a land- ing field, in aviation, the place where aircraft take off and land— an area of study can serve as a launching pad for new ideas and understandings; a field of rest, a place for picnics, lovemaking, sleep and dreaming, or a final resting place— study can be a form of leisure and relaxation rather than work, a form of passion, and a site where scholars of the past are remembered; a field within a work of art, the background upon which figures may be added— an area of study providing the background out of which new discoveries can be added, figure- ground relation- ships figuring prominently in the media ecology of McLuhan (1962, 1964); a field within the video image, based on old cathode ray tube technology, a still image that consists of only half the image, every other line, as alternate lines are activated at any given moment— scholarship can only ever give us a snapshot of thought, frozen in time, unable to keep up with changing times, or even capture the present fully, and always unavoidably incomplete, a product of what Korzyb- ski (1993) called the process of abstracting; a field of human activity, any sphere of skilled work, not simply scholarship, but the field of medicine, of metallurgy, of music, etc.—scholarship being connected, or at least ought to be connected, to the human life world, to practice in the political, economic, and social spheres, an idea that media ecologists take very much to heart; a field in geography, some aspect of the physical environment, such as temperature, humidity, elevation, population density, etc.—scholarship involves the study of some subset of our environment, and of course media ecology being an environmental form of study; an electromagnetic field— study often seeks to make visible aspects of the envi- ronment that are invisible, and uncover patterns of energy and force that affect other parts of the environment, media ecology having a special concern with how effects are generated, and with electronic media as defining a new era in human history; the field in astrophysics, the sum total of the space- time continuum— this is the ultimate environment, suggesting the ultimate goal of scholarship, at least according to some, of consilience, the unity of all knowledge, media ecology again being about life, the universe, and everything, and perhaps having something to offer even in this arena.

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I will end this section by noting that, rather than field of inquiry, the more commonly used phrase is field of study, and this is how I characterized media ecology previously, in Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as Field of Study (2006). Field of inquiry and field of study are synonymous, but field of inquiry bet- ter represents the idea of media ecology as an approach, which is what I want to stress in this book.

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