Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 12, Issue 3-4, 2013

In this article we examine the thesis that Sigmund Freud might have had a possible influence on the thinking of Marshall McLuhan. We also develop the parallels in their thinking. The first hint of this connection is that McLuhan frequently refers to Freud in his writings. The second hint is that both men were battling invisible forces - unnoticed or subliminal effects of media for McLuhan and repressed memories and the unconscious for Freud. We present this hypothesis as a probe, which we believe has some degree of truth to it given the frequency with which McLuhan referred to and quoted Freud. Even if it is not true it is still illuminating to see the parallels of these two revolutionary thinkers who explored the workings of the human psyche from two completely different perspectives.

This article considers Georg Simmel’s contributions to media ecology. By examining various dialectics of subjectivity and cultural form (especially how valuation relates to money) and also by delineating how humanity takes its structure from resistances and boundaries which in their turn need to be transcended, Simmel’s work outlines both the basic dynamics of cultural process and the tragedy of culture itself: people can grow themselves only by fashioning and cultivating the world, and yet, as civilization grows, people increasingly shape themselves by beginning their worldly pursuits in the trails that others have left behind. An unfortunate consequence is that many cultural forms and practices quite easily become understood as wholly ends in themselves rather than as they were originally understood, means to an end.

The affordance concept became a core feature of psychologist J. J. Gibson’s later work informing his ‘ecological approach’ to perception. Affordance refers to the practical properties of objects or artefacts; how these properties illuminate the many different possibilities and prohibitions for thought and action that emerge in that altered context. The aim of this article is to detail how and where Gibson’s thinking aligns with, qualifies, and extends the general methodological approach of media ecology, with a special focus on his affordance concept as an analogue to Marshall McLuhan’s technological extension or prosthesis idea. With a soft kind of determinism operating in the background, the affordance and extension can work synergistically to help us understand how the formal properties of some things, and the interaction of organisms and things does much to enable, limit, delimit, and even help determine what some thing or someone can do.

Gregory Bateson and Paul Watzlawick provide an important contribution to the field of media ecology through their application of a systems view to the study of communication. Bateson emphasizes the concept of difference, and information as a difference that makes a difference. He also stresses the importance of negative feedback, and patterns that connect in regard to the systems view. Watzlawick explains the systems view via group theory and the theory of logical types, posits as his first axiom that one cannot not communicate, and distinguishes between different levels of communication and metacommunication, content and relationship, first and second order knowledge and reality, digital and analogical modes of communication, and symmetrical and complementary interaction, along with key concepts of confirmation, disconfirmation, and the double bind.

The figure-ground structure of a four part approach to analysing media, merging McLuhan’s Laws of the Media (1988) with the Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Canonical Formula, allows us to focus our enquiry on the ways a new technology transforms society rather than technology content alone. The hidden biases of a new technology can change our assumptions about what is valuable and what is not, what is true and what is false, and who are the winners and the losers in the new Media Ecology. Ultimately, as Lévi-Strauss suggested in his study of myths, we may be able to go beyond traditional media content analysis to understand how technological transformations operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact.

Taking as its starting point Christine Nystrom’s definition of media ecology as the study of the interactions between communications media, technologies, techniques and processes, and human thought, feeling, value and behaviour, this article argues that media ecologists have inadequately developed the field’s consideration of the phenomenon we understand as ‘feeling’. With this in mind, I maintain that the affect-script theory of the personality theorist Silvan Tomkins has much to contribute to the media ecology perspective, not only in bringing to bear a nuanced understanding of emotional phenomena, but in what Tomkins’ ideas might contribute to our understanding of focal areas of media ecological concern, such as literacy, the accelerated rate of technological change and forms of violence.

If we take as a central maxim of media-ecological thought the proposition – central to the work of Marshall McLuhan – that our technological prostheses comprise spaces that we come to inhabit, then we can indeed call Michel Foucault a media-ecological thinker. In the following, we will undertake a brief exploration of the sense in which Foucault’s work explicates this fundamental media-ecological proposition, by way of some necessary clarifications regarding its provenance and milieu. This will not only provide us with a way of reading Foucault that highlights an important thread of continuity intrinsic to his corpus, but will also allow us to begin weaving this thread into the broad tapestry of twentieth century thinking on the formative properties of technics and media; a site where extraordinarily rich patterns have begun to emerge. If we can only begin to sketch out this way of reading Foucault, it is because of the caution that is required in dealing with his work, which represents a high point of twentieth century scholarship, deserving of a careful and sustained attention, for which I can only hope, within the constraints of this short article, to provide some small encouragement.

This article places Paul Virilio in the company of McLuhan, Foucault and Deleuze. After sketching out his intellectual personality, the article presents a few speed-induced media ecological and ethical problematics as Virilio sees them. It ends with two of Virilio’s signature notions – antiform and divergence – with the addition of a few tetrads. Finally, it points to further explorations that need to be made to fully capture the significance of Virilio’s work for the media ecology community, and for the good life.

Sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour’s work is almost never mentioned in media-ecological contexts, but considering the aim, style and scope of his work he can definitely be seen as a media ecologist pur sang. Moreover, he shares some essential premises with Marshall McLuhan. His notions of ‘actant’ or ‘hybrid’, ‘black box’, and ‘translation’, for instance, all find counterparts in ‘common’ media-ecological vocabulary. His advice to ‘follow the actors’, detective style, can be likened to McLuhan’s sleuth-like probing ‘method’. And they both make a similar cultural critique. Yet above and beyond these correspondences, some crucial divergences remain, more precisely with regard to the concept of agency. In this article I endeavour to outline the similarities and differences, which eventually lead me to a brief reflection on the ‘uniqueness’ of the discipline of media ecology.

A review is made of the systems biology work of Stuart Kauffman and Terrence Deacon. A parallel between their work and media ecology is developed. An argument is made that Media Ecology is about the application of systems thinking to understanding media, communications and the impact of technology.

Media outlets enthusiastically cover news of political sex scandals in the United States when a politician is caught breaking sexual norms. While the content of scandals, by definition, is sensational and highly titillating, it is important not to view these events merely as filler, soft news. Rather, this article argues that while scandal is an outgrowth of television culture, indicative of the premium society places on its scintillating content, analysis of mediated scandals can also reveal fundamental elements of our social fabric that make the subject necessary for analysis.

This article inverts Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism, ‘the medium is the message’, coined more than half a century ago, to make the argument that it is the message – in this case hyper-capitalism – that shapes the medium and governs the context in which media are introduced and operate. Harsh life conditions under hyper-capitalism make communication technologies, such as mobile phones and their numerous devices including text-messaging, a necessity. Hyper-capitalism cashes in on such communication devices without weighing their negative impact on culture. It is time that the system put people (and culture) before profit.

Understanding Jacques Ellul, Jeffrey P. Greeman, Read Mercer Schuchardt and Noah J. Toly (2012) Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 174 pp., ISBN: 978-1610974318, p/bk, $21.00

Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind, John Foley Miles (2012) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 312 pp., ISBN:-13: 978-0252078699, p/bk, $27.00

On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age, Oren Meyers, Motti Neiger and Eyal Zandberg (eds) (2011) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 296 pp., ISBN: 978-0230275683, h/bk, $95.00