Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 18, Issue 4, 2019

In this address, Eric McLuhan discusses the origins and importance of taking an ecological approach to studying media. In regard to the current media environment, he argues that the West is currently experiencing a new renaissance, and a new form of nomadism. The address concludes with a call for education geared towards active intervention in the media environment.

This article considers the biases of the popular press, the first mass-print medium, alongside the biases of gender and professionalism in Edgar Allan Poe’s early 1840s detective fiction. In the tales ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’, detective C. Auguste Dupin develops unmatched analytical and professional capabilities through his extensive reading of print media and his familiarity with the protocols of the nineteenth-century penny press. Based on the model of the New York Sun, these cheap publications popularized women’s gruesome deaths and cruel misfortunes for profit. In Dupin’s media environment, women are always-already victims without the means or opportunity to speak for themselves, maintain steady employment, or find shelter from the exploitative practices of the commercial press. Men like Dupin, on the other hand, stand to build professional skills, wealth and fame the more they study and replicate the practices of their print media environment. Reading Poe’s representation of gender inequity as an extension of the penny press and middle-class professionalism complicates previous assessments of Dupin (by Marshall McLuhan and literary scholars alike) as an inclusive literary figure that invites reader participation.

This essay discusses a foundational theory in media studies and uses an experiential approach to learning the concept. Based on the foundational writings of Sapir, Innes, McLuhan, Postman and others, the following is a two-part assignment that appears simple but can be quite complex. When looking at the cultural influence of media, we are often misled by the illusion of content. This assignment requires the student to examine how the form of a medium of communication influences the content. The student is asked to write a brief comparative analysis (two to four pages) of the same story in two different media, e.g., television news story and print journalism; a novel and a film; a blog and an audio story, etc. Again, students find this assignment quite difficult because now they are asked to show how the medium of communication being used actually changes the content.