Concerning Media Ecology

The world, especially the West, is currently in the grip of the largest and grandest renaissance in all of human history, and the author contends that the situation should be of profound media ecological concern. Every imaginable corner of culture, arts, and sciences demonstrate evidence of the present ferment of discovery and rediscovery, rendered almost invisible by the presence and pervasiveness facilitated by electronic media. Electronic media have also engendered a shift toward nomadism—physical, cultural, and metaphysical. Media ecology, he asserts, has a duty to warn the public and legislators of the toxic side effects of new media/environments in the world’s cultures and societies, including our own. The author invites media ecologists to renew their fervour in efforts to understand and explain the services, disservices, and rearrangements in the scale and pace of life and culture and self that we make in accommodating ourselves to new technologies.