Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 18, Issue 1-2, 2019

The phenomenon of personally addressing the dead through letters published in public media is a prevalent communicative practice that has earned little academic notice. This practice disrupts some common communication principles and provides us with new understandings of how communication works – by travelling, rather than reaching an end. To encapsulate and characterize this phenomenon, this article focuses on an Israeli case study of letters written to the dead and published in popular newspapers. I use a media ecology approach to phenomenologically classify five sets of characteristics in order to stimulate future discussion and analysis.

By applying Marshall McLuhan’s tetrad, this article proposes and responds to the question, ‘[h]ow does mixed reality change and create social environments?’. Historical examples of media as tools and modes of experience are described and assessed in order to reveal traces of the old and the ancient found in mixed reality. These examples include the Palais de l’electricité of 1900 and the medieval palimpsest. The article concludes with the argument that mixed reality foretells a new age of consumption.

This article works to uncover the nature of the currents of hostility that flow through various mediums in cyberspace. Drawing predominantly Ong’s work on contest and Ihde’s phenomenology of technics, the article explores how screens extend thought space and, at the same time, extend and simultaneously filter the presence of others. An additional encounter of presence, a hermeneutic presence, is a feature of our digital age and relies on our own limitations – cognitive, interpretive and communicative. These limitations lead to a concealment, a loss of hermeneutic cues, natural to presence, which can cause reversion to agonistic practices from orality.

The Edward Snowden revelations of leaked National Security Agency documents in 2013 received considerable attention in the scholarly and popular media. More recently, Facebook and other social media sites have come under scrutiny for their role in the 2016 US elections. Surveys of attitudes consistently indicate that Americans fear identity theft and other problems arising from Internet use. Yet Americans consistently turn over their personal data to Google, Facebook and other large companies. An important 2015 study of Internet browsing habits showed that users, after an initial concern with privacy-enhancing technologies following the Snowden revelations, quickly returned to sports and celebrity gossip as loci of interest. This article teases out reasons for the apparent contradiction. It uses Walter J. Ong’s work, Norbert Elias’s study of manners, along with more recent scholarship on privacy, on the early book trade and on aspects of the early modern period to argue that the contemporary concept of privacy is historically contingent. Historical circumstances and the development of certain technologies encouraged the development of privacy and the self. Current circumstances and technologies are contributing to their decay. This article grows out of two preliminary addresses, one given at the 2016 meeting of the Media Ecology Association in Bologna and the other at a meeting of the Gonzaga University Socratic Club in 2018.