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- Volume 14, Issue 3, 2015
Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 14, Issue 3-4, 2015
Volume 14, Issue 3-4, 2015
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Technical power and human impotence
More LessAbstractThe article presents an overview of a five-volume study of the transition of our civilization from a primary reliance on approaches to human knowing and doing based on symbolization and culture to a primary reliance on approaches organizing this knowing and doing by means of disciplines, which has taken us well beyond rationality and technique as a result of desymbolization. It is undermining our being a symbolic species by reifying human lives and communities while creating ways of life that cannot be sustained by the biosphere. These developments have significantly affected the roles of the old and new media in our lives.
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The knowledge of the artist and human survival
More LessAbstractMarshall McLuhan’s assertion that the artist’s capacity for awareness of the medium character of reality represents a form of knowledge that is, ‘… now needed for (human) survival’ is employed to probe technology as world-view – reality mediated by representation – that is historically disremembered for the alienating condition of technopoly to prevail. The artist paradoxically renders the unconscious environmental character of mediation apparent to thought and sensibility, bringing ground in the figure/ground relationship to awareness as ground – without objectifying ground as figure – similar to knowledge of chora that Plato in Timaeus provocatively named, a kind of ‘bastard-reckoning’. Referring to Einstein, Grant, Heidegger, Descartes, and Arendt, technology as world-view is historically/philosophically un-framed to recuperate this non-objective sensibility of our worldreality within modes of praxis – thinking, making, and acting – as the foundation for re-forming our irrevocably intertwined social and natural worlds transformed to the point of devastation by technological activity.
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We need more imposters!
More LessAbstractWhose voice(s) can be heard today let alone confront technopoly? How can or should the sensitive, balanced, integral and perceptually equipped individual (aka the would-be critic and/or media activist) contend with the stresses resulting from the psychological effects of alienation from an irrational, decaying and vicious society and simultaneous impulse to merge with the media? This retrospective offers an exploration of how and why the early-McLuhan grappled with these concerns immediately prior to undertaking his public campaign to ‘kick (media) in the guts’. This article seeks to show that self-management – the role and personae McLuhan adopted, the voice(s) with which he spoke, his survival strategies in the face of the maelstrom, and how he positioned himself in relation to his audiences – was an integral feature of his methodology, and how McLuhan’s preparation for his public campaign, conducted in and through an extensive study of other artists, may serve as a viable model of necessary preparation for intelligent action.
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Questions concerning Ge-Stell: Heideggerian confrontations with technology
More LessAbstractMartin Heidegger (1889–1976) gained a reputation as one of the most significant and perhaps infamous continental philosophers of the twentieth century. This article addresses the following question: how did Heidegger’s confrontations with ge-stell articulate an approach for contemporary human beings to resist technological domination? Ge-Stell refers to Heidegger’s term for the essence of technology. The essence of technology represents the presupposition that technology provides a means for human beings to dominate nature and to establish a system for ordering the world according to perspectives driven by technology. First, ge-stell is noted as Heidegger’s term that described the essence of technology. Ge-Stell functioned as a paradigm in which human beings accepted technology as the source for answers to all questions and for solutions to all problems about existence. Second, Heidegger’s embrace of Nazism is interpreted as his first attempt to confront ge-stell and to enact a metaphysical revolution in Germany. Third, thinking poetically is positioned as Heidegger’s most successful way for human beings to resist technological domination. Heidegger’s call to thinking represents a bottom-up approach to enact social change that empowers each person to resist ge-stell on an individual basis.
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Surviving information overload: A plea for balance
More LessAbstractHuman nature and language provide limits for the processing of information, but at the same time people are flexible and try to adapt to their changing media environments. The inability to adapt, however, has specific social and psychological consequences, and here I discuss the main characteristics of reaction to the contemporary information overload. The practices that surround an ‘escape from freedom’ are common, and people have many media practices that could be interpreted as attempts to escape the problem of information overload, even if these are not ultimate solutions. To understand the problem, however, is the first step towards survival, and the key point is that information overload violates the balance between nature and technology and between ‘life’ and ‘death’. Survival will therefore involve retrieving a sense of balance.
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The body electric in the age of virtual reality and transhumanism: Forces changing the West’s notions of self, identity and humanness
More LessAbstractThis article begins by exploring the relationships connecting Walt Whitman’s ‘body electric’, Marshall McLuhan’s ‘discarnate man [sic]’ and Neil Postman’s ‘citizen of technopoly’. It then examines the disruptive effects that electric technologies have had on western culture’s notions of ‘self’, ‘identity’ and particularly ‘the body’, especially the development of Virtual Reality systems, social networking and transhuman technologies over the past three decades. A survey of new wearable and immersive devices, advances in artificial intelligence, and invasive biotechnical procedures reveals increasingly questionable attempts to replace the human body by machines. These endeavours are supported, notably, by some of the world’s wealthiest investors in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, statesmen, media barons and members of the military – the forces of technopoly. The article concludes that, despite the efforts to replicate, improve or even replace it, the body is essential to our humanness.
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Postman’s loving resistance fighter and Ellul’s Christian anarchy as counters to technopoly
More LessAbstractNeil Postman and Jacques Ellul both critiqued a media culture dominated by technique, or technology, although each had a different name for it. Postman called it ‘technopoly’; Ellul called it ‘technological society’ long before. As different as the names were their proposed stances to combat it. Postman wrote fleetingly of the ‘loving resistance fighter’, Ellul of the ‘Christian anarchist’. The former was a more individualized, education-based response, the latter a political, activist response. This article compares their responses and offers a synthesis of the two, ‘the media ecology education anarchist’ in an attempt to mesh the strengths of each approach.
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The media literacy movement’s debt to Marshall McLuhan
By Alex KuskisAbstractMedia ecologists Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman considered education to be the essential way to counter the negative effects of technopoly, which define a culture that deifies technology, and seeks support, authority and its satisfactions from it. The relatively new subject of media literacy seeks to convey awareness of media’s potential harms and to shield its users from becoming unwilling servants of technology. Marshall McLuhan wrote extensively about education and created the very first high school media studies curriculum for the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) in the United States, influencing the media literacy practitioners to come. The first generation of media literacy teachers in Canada and the United States adopted a broad conception of what was needed for students to be considered media literate. The question to be considered is whether, since then the teaching of media literacy has become focused more narrowly on content analysis and the how-to aspects of media use, while neglecting the theoretical and conceptual roots of media studies.
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Technopoly and the education of children: Media ecology as a form of reflection, praxis and resistance
Authors: Robert Albrecht and Carmine TaboneAbstractThe central theme in the work of Neil Postman focuses repeatedly on the dangers posed by the presence of electronic technology in every facet of our communication environment. Postman termed this relentless intrusion of technology in society ‘technopoly’ and warned of dire consequences if left unchecked, unnoticed and unopposed. Postman frequently advocated educational reform to meet this challenge and sketched some general ideas but was never systematically involved with such an attempt. In this article, the authors outline a 40-year educational experiment designed to resist the harmful effects of electronic technology by developing an ‘oral curriculum’ that engages children through a wide range of interpersonal and creative arts strategies. By deliberately adapting a ‘lo-tech’ workshop model that relies heavily on oral communication, the asking of questions and the development of literacy through engagement with the creative uses of drama, the Educational Arts Team has fostered a pedagogy that seeks to counter the ascendancy of electronic technology in the lives of children.
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Reviews
Authors: Phil Rose, Brett Lunceford and Robert K. LoganAbstractNeuroscience and Media: New Un derstandings and Representations, Michael Grabowski (2015) New York: Routledge, 241 pp., ISBN: 9781138811508, h/bk; ISBN: 9781315749235, e-book, $145.00
Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, E. G. Coleman (2013) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 272 pp., ISBN: 9780691144610, Paperback, $27.95
Marshall McLuhan and Northrup Frye: Apocalypse and Alchemy, B. W. Powe (2014) Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 368 pp., Paperback, $32.95
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 23 (2024)
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Volume 22 (2023)
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Volume 21 (2022)
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Volume 20 (2021)
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Volume 19 (2020)
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Volume 18 (2019)
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Volume 17 (2018)
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Volume 16 (2017)
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Volume 15 (2016)
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Volume 14 (2015)
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Volume 13 (2014)
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Volume 12 (2013)
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Volume 11 (2012)
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Volume 10 (2011)
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Volume 9 (2010)
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Volume 8 (2009)
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Volume 7 (2008)
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Volume 6 (2007)
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Volume 5 (2006)
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Volume 4 (2005)
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Volume 3 (2004)
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Volume 2 (2003)
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Volume 1 (2002)