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  5. Volume 20, Issue 1, 2021

Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 20, Issue 1, 2021

Volume 20, Issue 1

Volume 20, Issue 1, 2021

Language: English
  • MEA Conference

      • The Zossima Principle as an ideal for media ecology praxis

        https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00069_1

        This article develops the Zossima Principle as an ideal for the study of media ecology praxis. As such, I suggest that the Zossima Principle holds the potential to inform what we study as media ecologists and how we engage the world with practical responses to the exigencies and social issues arising from our analyses. I set the Zossima Principle in dialectical tension with Morris Berman’s (2000, 2013) articulation of the monastic option. I argue that Berman’s monastic option does not maintain the potential for substantive cultural rejuvenation. The Zossima Principle, based on the exhortations of Dostoyevsky’s elder monk from the novel , embraces a philosophy of existentialized love. This article demonstrates striking parallels between the ideas developed in the Zossima Principle and the writings of Lewis Mumford. I conclude with a series of pragmatic steps we can take as media ecologists, if we allow ourselves to take seriously the arguments underscoring this ideal.

    • Solace in sound: Glenn Gould’s electronic solitude

      https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00070_1

      Inspired by Marshall McLuhan, pianist Glenn Gould dedicated his career to polemics against the concert hall tradition. Through radio/television broadcasts, written works and contentious recorded catalogue, Gould advocated adoption of the new electric media environment of the mid-twentieth century, challenging musical traditions of centuries past. Gould also used telephonic technology to mediate contact with the outside world. Gould has been acknowledged by such authors as Paul Théberge as putting into practice the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. In this study, I follow Robert Logan’s work in media ecology and general systems and investigate Gould’s polemics through systems theory. In particular, I employ Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems, offering a model of society through which we may observe the effects of electric technology via the notion of functional de-differentiation of social systems as discussed by authors such as Erkki Sevänen. I suggest that Gould’s polemics are not just commentary on musical tradition but the media environments in which those traditions arose and show how we too can find solace in sound.

  • Articles

      • Conceptualizing communities of truth on YouTube

        https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00071_1

        Commentary on YouTube has been characterized as a ‘cesspool’. Yet, participants with divergent opinions do post comments to exchange ideas and share information. This study analyses comments posted to a video about YouTube community to investigate the site’s potential for knowledge exploration. The study analyses whether commentary dynamics exhibit those found in prior scholars’ rubric of a . This model rejects hierarchical forms of learning and advocates sincere information sharing and evaluation. The article argues that certain strands of media ecology scholarship are commensurate with the principles of a community of truth, in which knowledge seekers deploy digital environments to collectively explore a subject of inquiry – in this case the potential for establishing a YouTube community. Such a knowledge subject does not exist as a pre-defined object in the world but rather emerges through digital interaction that channels the subject’s desires about its ideal form through YouTube comments.

    • Sphere ecology: Peter Sloterdijk’s spatial-analytic approach to media environments

      https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00072_1

      This article makes the case for reading the German philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk as a media ecologist. Tracing the media ecological implications of what is perhaps his most significant work, the three-volume Spheres project, it argues that Sloterdijk’s spatial analysis of human habitats, what he terms spherology, can be interpreted as offering a promising, distinctive approach to the study of media as environments. By redescribing media as morpho-immunological spheres, or shared spatial interiors, Sloterdijk recasts both human existence and sociocultural change as the result of the interplay or mediation between a relative enclosure into a protective space and a world considered to be outside. This framework, which enables Sloterdijk to chart a grand narrative of globalization, yields a therapeutic methodological strategy by means of which media ecologists may increase the spacious dimensions of the world while strengthening the immune systems of newly designed artificial atmospheres.

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