Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2014

In the mid-1980s, hip hop began shifting from a subcultural articulation organized around a set of cultural practices – namely breaking (breakdancing), graffiti and party-DJing – to an articulation as rap music culture. I use the scholarship of media ecologist Harold Adams Innis to argue that the distinct and opposing medial, or structural, qualities of the elements primary to each articulation contributed to this shift. Looking at these competing articulations of hip hop through the lens of media ecology in detail illuminates telling differences about the articulations of hip hop culture in the mid-1980s that may help further explain the current definitive dominance of rap music in hip hop culture.

This article provides a retrospective of the later-McLuhan’s dialogue with the Christian community and seeks to demonstrate how one facet of McLuhan’s enterprise was orientated towards enabling the Church to perform a media ecological role as an anti-environment in the era of ‘discarnate man [sic]’. The value of this retrospective is, primarily, historical. This case study of media ecological praxis provides a fresh perspective on McLuhan’s procedure of organizing ignorance for discovery, how he managed his dramatis personae, and offers a nuanced portrait of McLuhan as a figure who was in touch with the Church and sought the new via calculated translation, transposition and transformation of the old into the living present.

Photographs look objective and truthful when in fact they are affected by the human factor and by the ideology of the society in which they are produced. In turn, they recycle this ideology by creating models upon which we pattern ourselves and our environment. Taking a comparative perspective, this article explores the visual themes used in five newspapers in Greece and Spain to represent immigrants, given that the thematic context in which immigrants appear is crucial for the viewers’ perception of the depicted people. Press photographs are treated as cultural text, capable of conveying meaning independent of the accompanying report or article, and are analysed using content analysis. The results of this research show that press photographs place immigrants in a rather narrow frame of reference, directing public opinion towards associating them with specific ‘functions’ in society and preventing their association with the normality of life.

Drawing on the work of Marshall McLuhan and subsequent theories of media ecology, this article seeks to build upon an understanding of the complex interactions of the material and symbolic aspects of human action. To do so, I perform a tetradic analysis of an educational movement referred to as Do-It-Yourself (DIY) education. Broadly defined, the DIY education movement includes any attempt to decentralize or disrupt traditional place-based educational models through the sometimes collective, other times individual use of digital media. Thus, The DIY movement is not simply a description of a particular model but rather, models that emerge or otherwise reflect a particular educational ideology. Accordingly, examples of this model could include online educational communities such as YouTube or for the purposes of this article, MOOCs. Ultimately then, through an analysis of the DIY movement I seek to elucidate the educational forms that emerge as a result of the interplay among discourses and technologies related to contemporary understandings of teaching and learning.

Of Ong & Media Ecology: Essays in Communication, Composition, and Literary Studies, Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (eds) (2012) New York, NY: Hampton Press, 364 pp., ISBN: 9781612890753, p/bk, $39.95

The Newsphere: Understanding the News and Information Environment, Tracy M. Christine (2012) New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 132 pp., ISBN: 9791433110436, p/bk, $34.95

An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology, Anna Munster (2013) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 248 pp., ISBN: 9780262018951, h/bk, $30.00