Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2016

This article takes mediating processes, rather than media objects, as its focus. It examines three different formulations of knowledge mediation, each of which can be modelled as a diagrammatic structure that takes historical as well as contemporary form. These three formulations are declarative/instrumental, contemplative/generative, and stochastic/constitutive, and each is positioned differently with respect to the idea that media “operationalize” knowledge. The goal is to suggest that we might “think media” beyond instrumental activity, by paying attention to mediating processes, rather than media objects, and that this might shift focus in media theory from attending to the social character of media, towards understanding the mediating aspects of “the social”.

A new form of social change through social media is hasthag activism, in which activists draw attention to a specific cause by using a metadata tag, such as #BlackLivesMatter. This new mechanism for social change in our new media environment is questionable, and there is little understanding of what this type of activism creates. Media ecology offers insight into the possible consequences of engagement with hashtag activism and proposes ways we can understand how it alters our consciousness and behaviour. Using the metaphor of a kaleidoscope, we explore what hashtag activism offers, its multi-layered beauty as well as the dark side of this new media form. We examine how hashtag activism furthers (and doesn’t) democratic communication and participation and offer some directions for future research into these online forms of resistance.

On 9 August 2014, Michael Brown, a young man of barely 18 years, was killed by Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson, which renewed discourse surrounding the occurrences of racial violence in the United States enacted at the hands of police. Brown’s death led to the development of a hashtag movement called #HandsUpDontShoot on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, which critiqued the disparate treatment of racial minorities and the excessive use of (often deadly) force by police on black bodies. #HandsUpDontShoot offers an example how the convergence of subjectivities occurs affectively: the hashtag, while making a discursive appeal to consider Michael Brown’s rumoured stance of surrender when he was shot by Wilson, also featured photos of movement participants recreating his pose with their own bodies. Further, the embodied affect of the movement overlapped and entangled with that of offline spaces, where protesters on the ground in Ferguson and other communities began to raise their hands above their head in a desire to not only create an external spectacle of Brown’s victimhood, but to live within the subjectivity of his abject body. Through a media ecology analysis, I argue that the subjectivity of Brown’s body was kept alive through the movement, as the hashtag and associated imagery can be seen as material extensions of Michael Brown’s body and a desire to make sense of Brown’s death through an affective exchange with the body in peril. In this sense, the participants of #HandsUpDontShoot transformed the movement from a space for standing with the victim to a state of standing within the body in peril.

The authors argue that Gilles Deleuze can be read as a media ecologist, extending many insights of Marshall McLuhan’s including the idea that the medium is the message, that the content of any medium is another medium, and that media extend and alter human faculties. Yet since McLuhan preferred to write in axioms and probes, Deleuze provides a more robust theorizing of these issues. Specifically, Deleuze advances on McLuhan by providing a more complex notion of media as assemblages, avoiding the dilemmas of technological determinism, by developing a more robust way of understanding affect and desire, away from McLuhan’s notion of sensory ratios, and by establishing power and ethics as central concerns, against McLuhan’s primarily descriptive scholarly approach. We conclude that Deleuze thus illustrates the continuing relevance of McLuhan’s foundational work, yet his advances on McLuhan offer many prospects for improving the study of media from a media ecological perspective.

This article explores the relationship Marshall McLuhan has with the sphere of modern and contemporary art. Some of McLuhan´s concepts (such as probe, artist, medium) are explained following Wyndham Lewis’s view and understanding of the twentieth-century modernism art sphere. McLuhan’s 1954 edition of Counterblast presents itself as a valuable tool for this analysis. The contemporary art scene is quickly analyzed through a contrast between Paul Virilio’s view on contemporary art and some of McLuhan’s comment on the role of art and the artist. The concepts of cliché and archetype are used for this enterprise.

The year 2014 marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), third book of Herbert Marshall McLuhan, and of considerable transcendence in the contemporary communicology imaginary. In the referred text it is possible to find the foundations of the ‘McLuhan tetrad’, which admits to be considered as the perfect conclusion of McLuhan’s fruitful intellectual work. The tetrad was released by Eric McLuhan, the eldest of the six children of Marshall, in the book, Laws Media: The New Science (1988).

The Secret War between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine, Peter Lunenfeld (2011) London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 219 pp., ISBN: 9780262015479, p/bk, $27.86

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, E. G. Coleman (2013) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 272 pp., ISBN-10: 0691144613, p/bk, $17.75