Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 13, Issue 3-4, 2014

Looking beyond celebrants and sceptics of social media, Kevin Healey taps the potential that exists to develop social media platforms, ethical codes and regulatory policies that support democratic values and institutions. This requires rejecting the capitalist ideology that drives debates about consumer privacy, industry regulation, and national security. He puts forward a commons-based approach to argue that democratic media must have elements independent from both state and corporate institutions. This framework views media in terms of public goods. Today, governments may have to subsidize networks that have become necessary. Expanding ‘the digital commons’ also requires universal principles that enable corporations, governments, activists, journalists and the public to assess changes in digital media. Pursuing the metaphor of social media as a coffeehouse requires a collective ­struggle. Social media ethics cannot be reduced to personal conduct, but must question the technologies, legal frameworks and organizational structures that constitute the networked environment within which citizens pursue their personal, social and political goals in order to achieve a mature social media environment that is both ethically responsive and economically sustainable.

This article explores the expanding body of scholarship on globalization in conjunction with media ecology’s potential to enrich and clarify the concept of globalization. Marshall McLuhan represents a point of contact for media ecology to globalization discourse, especially considering how often globalization scholars cite McLuhan’s notion of the ‘global village’. That village is an environment produced both by technological change and human imagination of this globalized environment. The author proposed several areas of dialogue and overlap, including themes of transformation, intensification of social relations, and culture that link the corpus of globalization discourse to media ecology.

The increasing mediatization of everyday life has raised many concerns about the cultural consequences of digital technology and possibilities for individual self-determination. This article examines innovative practices of unplugging that people have constructed to challenge media logic and contest dominant cultural values – by creating create times and spaces of demediatization. The media ecology perspective, especially the work of James Carey, helps to shed light upon new rituals such as digital Sabbaths, fasts, diets and detox that advocate reducing or avoiding media use. An analysis of the spiritual and corporeal metaphors in popular discourse about unplugging reveals many symbolic and instrumental meanings that motivate resistant media users, a group oft-neglected by researchers. This article considers the collective obstacles to such individual practices and demonstrates that through constructive rituals, unpluggers not only critique mainstream culture but also enact an alternative vision of life.

Examining Marshall McLuhan’s idiosyncratic adoption of the Aristotelian concept of formal cause, this article contends that McLuhan’s emphasis upon form, and his refusal to engage with the question of materiality, traps his theory within a hylomorphic schema that considers mediation only in terms of its effects upon an audience, thus failing to take into account the configurational attributes of hardware itself. Comparing McLuhan’s media theory to that of Friedrich Kittler, it is argued that the latter offers a valuable rejoinder to such formalism, allowing us to properly consider both the formal and material qualities of media in the digital age.

This article argues for a turn to more post-structuralist approaches to new media studies. By reviewing the existing literature on the role of new media in social movements, I contend that binaristic frames are still constraining new media studies. After elaborating upon the scholarship dealing with the use of Twitter in social movements like the Arab Spring, I examine how a turn to more post-structuralist approaches can aid in understanding new media within a complex system. Although the post-structuralist turn in communication is largely responsible for opening up the space that new media studies now inhabit, post-structuralism is largely abandoned upon entering this terrain. This piece calls for a return to post-structuralist methods to trace the role of new media across platforms using scholars such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Bruno Latour.

This article examines how Nollywood video films impact Nigerian and other African cultures and environments by connecting an oral culture such as Nigeria quickly through the literate phase to membership in the global village. It also contributes to McLuhan’s hot–cool model by applying it to Nollywood video films, which is complex because the term ‘video film’ connotes a combination of cool (i.e., television) and hot (i.e., cinema) media. Applying the hot–cool model to Nollywood productions suggests that quick and cheap productions are likely to distort African environments and cultures negatively, unlike the well-planned and larger budget productions that are likely to be made on celluloid. Finally, this article explicates two Nollywood video films in order to ascertain how the Nigerian and other African environments and cultures are impacted in light of the complexity of hot and cool media. The article concludes that quick productions are better viewed and decoded via a cool medium, while well-planned productions are better viewed and decoded via either a hot or a cool medium.

Within the intellectual tradition of media ecology, the origins and dynamics of modernity are attributed to the influence of the printing press. But this tradition, however, restricted as it has been largely to the study of written, printed, or at least language-based phenomena of the period, tends to tell a story of the origins of modernity in a relatively Protestant, northern-European context. But what of the Catholic South, where the printed word did not so readily reach the masses, and the image, disseminated via the plastic arts, continued to hold sway? It is in the social history of art that a media ecological perspective finds a parallel narrative of the birth of modernity, set largely in Catholic, southern Europe, but which soon spreads north via the artistic style and cultural sensibility of Mannerism. This article traces parallels between these two narratives in order to better understand this crucial cultural concept.

While Mediaeval manuscripts have long been acknowledged as a means of conveying architectural designs across Europe, their role as active intermediaries shaping the symbolic language of spaces merits much closer attention. The design of the Palatine Chapel in Aachen clearly draws from San Vitale in Ravenna, but the chapel’s use of columns within the span of its upper-most arches stands out as a rather startling combination. This article argues that these distinctive features that encode a unique imperial programme specific to the needs of the Carolingians could only have suggested themselves through the intermediation of abstracted architectural frameworks in Eusebean Tables and Evangelist Portraits in illuminated manuscripts.

Media ecology is an interdisciplinary humanistic endeavour relying on inspiration and intuition, encouraging discovery learning and training of perception rather than memorization of facts and slovenly adherence to methodologies. However, teaching it often calls for a set of frameworks and methodologies that would provide a structure for students. This article briefly reviews four familiar frameworks developed by the founders of western media ecology (Nystrom’s synthesis of communication models, McLuhan’s tetrad, Postman’s set of seven questions, Ellul’s milieus as expanded by Garrison) and introduces a series of frameworks developed by the founder of the Russian school of the ecology of culture, Yuri Rozhdestvensky. These frameworks address levels of morality, semiosis of societies, communication strata and strata of culture. The article shows how these models can be applied in the classroom to encourage probing, discovery and pattern recognition. Finally the article proposes that inspiration and intuition be joined to a set of discipline specific methodologies.