Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 10, Issue 1-2, 2011

Photography and the modern wildlife conservation movement became entwined soon after their shared emergence in the middle of the 19th century. This article analyzes how photography, film, video, and digital imaging have shaped the movement and continue to exert influence. Images often dictate our knowledge of animal species in the wild, but they can be deceptive, and they have hindered as well as helped conservation efforts. The profusion of wildlife conservation imagery and continued politicized debates over appropriate strategies make it important to investigate the conflicted alliance between mechanical reproduction and the conservation movement.

This article draws on the belief that the contemporary conjuncture is in part defined in relationship to emerging new media, to pursue the thesis that logics of new mediation should not be selectively "discovered" in proximity to the digital and digitizing objects that are traditionally called new media technologies. Such logics are culturally pervasive and the implications of these logics extend to changing interactions with nondigital technologies that do not often, if ever, qualify as new media. If the logics of new mediation do underwrite our contemporary cultural condition, they have done work to redefine the relations that construct the contexts of life. These contexts include digital and mechanical technologies, but also the varied products of human intervention - including the production, distribution, consumption, and formation of discourse about food and drink.

In this article, I use Marshall McLuhan's corpus as a major source of inspiration. I see the English language as a potent configuring force in contemporary Chinese culture and problematize the impact of the language by looking into its specificity as a "medium." I argue that English embodies the alphabet effect in the Chinese cultural context. It is a "hot" medium, a site of power struggles, a vehicle of Western normativities, and the gateway toward a different reality. The goal of this article is to help users of English in China develop a heightened awareness of what the language does regardless of what it conveys. I invite those awash in the "English rush" to hold a comic, sophisticated attitude toward English, and to use English with an eye for "minorizing" it from within.

This article attempts to define spirituality from a brain studies perspective. In holonomic and connectionist brain studies there are three possible forms of consciousness: objective, narrative, and transcendental. Objective consciousness concerns linearities, order, structure, sequentialities, linguistics, time keeping, and so on. This form of consciousness is detrimental to achieving a spirituality. Narrative consciousness is an extension of objective consciousness with the addition of metaphoria and aesthetic flow. Narrative consciousness concerns an aesthetics of silence, paralinearities, daydreaming, life stories, feelings, and the like. Solitude is necessary to achieving a deeper kind of silence because well-planned solitude helps to eliminate pervasive kinds of objective, everyday consciousness. Also, solitude is an escape from the "pathologies of speed" and clock insanities that are increasingly troublesome with an increasing exponential acceleration. Some suggestions for achieving spiritual and deeper kinds of silence within naturalistic, solitudinal environments are offered. Transcendental consciousness concerns a deep, meditative silence, or widespread, temporary cortical brain synchronizations. This more profound silence concerns deeply restful, narrative, and peaceful solitude, leading to possible synchronous brain processes, an extensive now-ness, a primitivation of time, and a sense of timelessness. I propose that these highly synchronous brain states are necessary to many kinds of spiritual journeys.

This article explores the response of the British rock group Radiohead to the almost fatal creative paralysis that resulted from the enormous success and critical attention generated by their 1997 landmark recording Ok Computer. This adaptive response consisted of a vast effort to recreate and reidentify themselves, by way of a reconfiguration of both their artistic and commercial technological extensions, in an existential struggle to maintain an ongoing sense of authenticity.

Through a critical analysis we argue that, because of the commodification of educational products, students are being miseducated. Commodified education uncritically endorses establishment views and anti-intellectualism rather than providing students with what they need to understand society. Rather than seeing education as a process of developing the power of reasoning and judgment, students have been conditioned to place more emphasis on education as a vehicle for acquiring money. This anti-intellectual message is then reinforced by the profit-driven mass media, which celebrates consumerist values. Any solution to the problem requires the rejection of the commodity structure and its replacement with consciousnessraising and transformative education.

This article examines the relationship between the introduction of photography into American society in 1839 and changes in the concept of travel during the 19th century. Principles about the social consequences of photography formulated from the works of Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, and Susan Sontag serve as a framework to compare and contrast the predominant concepts of travel presented in magazine articles of travel advice published before and after the advent of photography. The principles focus on the medium's capacity to influence social and cultural thought and activity.

Technology challenges the traditional paradigm of storytelling by going beyond the printed page to still images juxtaposed with text and sound on the Internet. For this reason, traditional media have started to carve out a niche in content for savvy audiences beyond traditional media logic to capitalize on dynamic design and technologies specific to the Internet. This exploratory research used a Web survey to investigate the presentation mode of still images with sound. Magnum In Motion provided the news stories and design attributes were manipulated such as text, color, and sound. Results indicate that the storytelling presentation of still images with sound was received positively and an enjoyable experience.

This article presents a strategy for teaching health communication that fosters critical media literacy through the strategic combination of digital video, documentary film, video worksheets, and peer-reviewed journal articles. Given the media-saturated environment in which notions of health are shaped, critical media literacy skills are crucial to students in health-related fields. Cases of key concepts illustrated through documentary films and the peer-reviewed literature are presented. The article then explores how one class took the lead in designing a community event that critically engaged both a YouTube video and a documentary film about police brutality as a public health issue.

The growth of an American television culture has been slowly poisoning free-market capitalism by eroding the very logic on which capitalism depends. Consumerism is creeping into place as the primary American economic system. The transition from a typographic era to a televised one, and the subsequent reduction in propositionally structured information, has capitalism in its death throes. The presentationally structured symbolic form of television's message is self-perpetuating, recruiting and retaining consumers unable to make rational judgments of value or utility. The universally beneficial survival of the fittest effect is adversely affected by television's dumbing-down effect. Techniques of television advertising, offensive to the rational mind, are emotionally soothing and reassuring. Consumers from a young age are gently cajoled, using presentationally structured techniques, to consume. Television has effectively replaced capitalism with a similar-looking but fundamentally different phenomenon, irrational consumerism driven by emotion. The promise of the mutually beneficial transaction may soon be mere artifacts of a typographic golden age.

Rock and roll is a child of technology. Without electricity and amplification as its midwife, the music revolution that shook the world would most likely have been stillborn. For rock and roll, on a mainstream axis, technology was also its coffin. Without the electricity to power the guitar-based rhythm and blues, gospel and country sounds, rock and roll would most likely have been perceived as an off-shoot of any of these individual forms. Early methods of amplification and the electric guitar created a set of possibilities for sound and musical interpretation that lasted but a short while. On a mass cultural level, a larger share of the force behind the death of rock and roll enlightenment of the early 1970s falls to the collective impact of the Beatles and George Martin. The generational possibilities for growth and raw energy had changed and could not be retrieved. Although rock and roll never truly disappeared, it also never had the same cultural cachet that it commanded during its first decade or so.

WHEN MEDIA ARE NEW: UNDERSTANDING THE DYNAMICS OF NEW MEDIA ADOPTION AND USE, JOHN CAREY AND MARTIN C. J. ELTON (2010) Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press (374 pp.), ISBN 978-0-472-05085-7, $47.50 (paperback).YOU ARE NOT A GADGET: A MANIFESTO, JARON LANIER (2011) New York: Vintage (240 pp.), ISBN 978-0307389978, $15 (paperback)EXTRAORDINARY CANADIANS: MARSHALL McLUHAN, DOUGLAS COUPLAND (2010) Toronto, Canada: Penguin Canada (208 pp.), ISBN 9780670069224, $26 (hardback)