Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 14, Issue 1-2, 2015

This article builds a resource base for an understanding of philosopher and analyst Félix Guattari’s urbanism. By reviewing his deployments of Lewis Mumford’s concept of megamachines, and detailing his rejection of humanism and positive assessments of human–machine entanglements, I show that Guattari’s sense of the urban is defined as a machine that produces different kinds of subjectivities within an animistic assemblage of built structures. Further cross-references are pursued between Mumford’s criticisms of Marshall McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin, and the fertile technological overlap between McLuhan and Gilles Deleuze’s views of the screen in film and television. Guattari’s brand of post-humanism includes a recoded Mumfordian megamachine as a form of machinic enslavement that integrates humans–machines while downplaying the social dimension of subjugation.

Titus Lucretius Carus, or simply Lucretius (~94–55 bce), wrote the epic philosophical poem De Rerum Natura (common translation: On the Nature of Things, On the Nature of the Universe or The Way Things Are). The poem is an early scientific treatise, a classic example of grammar-as-interpretation that added some needed nuance to the rigid determinism of Democritus’ atomistic ontology and, more generally, promised to enlighten popular understanding of Epicurean philosophical doctrine. Key passages in Lucretius’ poem pre-empt several core precepts of media ecology, including the indeterminacy of causal explanation that amounts to a ‘soft’ form of determinism (i.e. ‘medium theory’) in both the natural and human-built worlds, whereby the formal properties of things offer clues to their causal potency, or capacity to effect change. It can be argued, by extension, that the media ecological emphasis on formal cause as the primary mechanism governing change also has roots in Lucretius’ epic poem.

Parallels between general systems theory and media ecology are drawn. It is shown that cybernetics, general systems theory, complexity theory, emergent dynamics and media ecology are interconnected and that they inform and cross-pollinate each other.

This article outlines Timothy Leary’s relationship with the field of media ecology. Leary’s well-known promotion of psychedelics is shown to relate to his broader interest in using technologies to enhance human abilities. Explicitly influenced by Marshall McLuhan, Leary’s ideas were framed in reference to an informationbased evolutionary cosmology in which new media facilitate freedom by augmenting cognition and breaking down oppressive institutions. Leary’s efforts to give these ideas practical expression also led to innovative experiments with media, including contributions to 1960s-era sound and light shows, spoken word performances and software programs still in use today. As a media theorist and practitioner as well as unequivocal champion of cognitive and social freedom, Leary deserves to be recognized as an iconic member of the media ecological tradition.

The article is devoted to the scientific legacy of a famous Soviet literary and culture scholar and semiotician, Yuri Lotman. Authors consider that many of Lotman’s ideas bring him together with the field of media ecology. Lotman’s cultural semiotics approach could in general be reduced to the formula ‘the medium is the text’. According to his studies the whole culture could be seen as a text that has interdependent ideas and structures. Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere, or dynamic inhomogeneous semiotic space, the cause and the result of culture, is analysed in the final part of the article. The main semiosphere features, which include two types of the text structure (binary and ternary) and two types of the cultural dynamics (progress and explosion), are depicted. We consider that the concept of the semiosphere is fruitful for further research of complicated and multilevel media environment.

This article uses McLuhan’s notions of hot and cool as heuristics to advance a critique of the city of Beijing as a living and lived material-symbolic complex. It both extends the applicability of these notions and draws attention to their paradoxical coexistence when the analysis becomes specific. The article ends by calling for a cooler Beijing, a society to come.

In this article I reflect on the obsolescence of Toronto in order to enquire into the fate of the city as a viable entity within the terms of Marshall McLuhan’s investigations of the late 1960s and their relevance for today. By 1968 McLuhan had pronounced the city obsolete in a universe of globe-extending news satellites and Bucky Fuller domes, that artefactualized and programmed nature. The city as obsolete was a ‘probe’ McLuhan offered to make sense of the enhancements of supersonic speeds of jet travel that he called Jet City. Using the Dew-Line Newsletter as my central point of reference, I want to develop McLuhan’s ideas that arose in the city’s wake; these are threefold: Jet City, mini-states and the application of the Joycean nostrum the ‘the urb… it orbs’. Indeed, in the 1970s McLuhan talked more and more about cities in terms of aviation-figures, as airports coordinating flights and passages, of corporate hijackings and crashes. McLuhan asked us to imagine ‘circulating cities’ in the forms of mass migrations, for business and pleasure, of populations on the move, anticipating the multiple mobilities of the present day. Yet at the same time, revealing the lived tension of his position, he acted against plans for the downtown Spadina Expressway, against the developers, as a homeowner who still lived in a neighbourhood worth protecting from development.

Utilizing Félix Guattari’s ecosophical ideas, the media critiques of Bernard Stiegler and Franco Berardi and the neuro-philosophy of Catherine Malabou, I shall examine and describe the case of hikikomori or social recluse in Japan as a striking excrescent effect of the media’s collusion in engineering sad affects. With reference to post-Fukushima Japan, and through the prism of contemporary literature, manga, anime and film, this article tests the propensity for loneliness among youth and how the media is complicit in crushing subjectivity through the veneer of ‘connection’.

This article posits that user-generated videos have the potential to modulate affective maps of, or the aggregation of our intensive dispositions towards, urban areas. It argues that bodily topologies, which reside in our neurological substrates, are the primary source of our cognitive understandings of space and that user-generated videos have the capacity to affect these maps through their circulation of multisensory rhetorics. Taken together, these videos’ tendency to obscure their images’ photo-realistic qualities and to provide visual and sonic sensations disrupt the potential for identification and encourage haptic modes of viewing that work primarily at the level of the virtual. As a case study, this article engages videos produced by self-styled urban explorers that provide tours of abandoned buildings in Detroit, Michigan. These videos, it argues, work through lighting, unsteady cameras, sound, image durations, and movement through space, to imbue the buildings with kinetic energies that may modulate audiences’ dispositions towards the Motor City.

The explosive development of new digital media technologies is often described as a media evolution but hardly ever is the concept of ‘media evolution’ taken at face value. This article takes up that challenge by combining cultural evolution theories with medium theory. The article argues that biological selection mechanisms can provide an inroad into a new kind of historical and structural understanding of the relation between human culture and our technologies. In specific, human history is seen as a cultural evolution in which media technologies are the selection mechanisms.

This paper analyses terrorism from the framework of ‘spectacle’ (Debord, 1995). In this context, ‘spectacle’ is a historical event that looks like a political drama, theatre, or even a play. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were played out as a script, mise en scène, and choreography. Terrorism can be a disaster or horror movie. This is made possible thanks to around-the-clock news and media images. Of particular importance is the ability of terrorism to command the audience’s gaze. As a spectacle, a terrorist act becomes a type of theatre; it is a performance to be seen. Electronic communications (television in particular) allow the immediate worldwide exposure of the terrorist spectacle. The purpose is to plant images – usually gory and frightening – in the audience’s collective memory. These images are seen, recorded, and usually unforgettable. The spectacle, then, becomes a ‘Culture of Terror’ (media images of horror and destruction).