Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 17, Issue 4, 2018

This article takes the position that our contemporary overheated media environment lends itself to comfortable passivity, resulting in mental breakdown in the guise of the dark emotions: anxiety, melancholia and boredom. This is especially the case with the inevitable synergy of the upcoming technological transformations from genetic modification, virtual reality simulacra and artificial intelligence/robotics. After discussing the data from the World Health Organization regarding the stark increase of people across the globe suffering from depression and anxiety, this article weds the concepts of McLuhan’s hot–cool distinction with Fromm’s delineation of the productive character orientation. Following Fromm, this article argues that joy ensues from reason, productive labour and love–sorrow from ignorance, alienated work and indifference. When we wilfully abrogate our responsibilities to self and other via non-participational mediated forms, we cede away our potential for growth and development. This leads to the emotional breakdowns of guilt, boredom, anxiety and melancholia. Viktor Frankl’s logotherapeutic perspective is discussed as a counterbalance to the social effects wrought by our overheated technological environment. Frankl’s stress on phenomenological meaning as the cornerstone of existence provides a lens to understanding the affects of an over-reliance on technological gadgetry.

The question of causality in the invention of the alphabet has long eluded the theories of media scholars and linguists alike. In spite of the attention to the effects of the alphabet and literacy within the tradition of media ecology, not much work exists tracing the effects back to the causes and explaining why the alphabet emerged in the first place. By applying the principles of McLuhan’s understanding of Aristotle’s notion of formal cause, the author approaches the invention of the alphabet as a grammatical step in the evolution of written language. Most simply, this article proposes that the development of alphabetic writing was required as an unintended consequence of writing via inscription on clay and stone tablets (as opposed to writing via application on paper, papyrus or bamboo). The author then situates this claim within the broader context of the evolution of grammar and punctuation, demonstrating that the figure of writing and grammar has shifted and evolved notably with every transition of a new medium on which words are fixed, even up through the electric and digital ages. Finally, this article situates the evolution of emoji within the context of grammatical evolution, and not, as some have asserted, as the return to pictographic language.

In this article, I provide a short but broad history of the textbook as a multimedia pedagogical and cultural form. In doing so, I pay particular attention to the interrelationship of oral and textual media and cultures, highlighting the ways that these two communicative modes are reconfigured over the history of this pedagogical form. I also situate the textbook in the context of changing instructional methods and practices, and I demonstrate that instructional forms and practices have neither progressed along with new technologies nor gradually evolved from a primitive orality to sophisticated literacy. Instead, I show that these practices as well as textbook media change much more in synchrony with larger cultural and epistemological developments – such as those identified by Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler and other historians of media and culture.

Photojournalism is a vital resource for thinking, feeling, expressing, acting and dealing with problems of collective living, argues Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. It is a kind of ‘equipment for living’. This article proposes the concept rhetorical working through as a way of describing how photojournalistic rhetoric functions as ‘equipment for living’. It argues that humans constantly perform three kinds of rhetorical working through: dealing with issues and arguments, dealing with social relations and dealing with identity and self.