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- Volume 21, Issue 2, 2022
Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 21, Issue 2-3, 2022
Volume 21, Issue 2-3, 2022
- Editorial
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- Introduction
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- Translated Article
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Translation of Yuri Rozhdestvensky’s 1967 article ‘Language theory and the problem of language development’
By Maria PolskiThe article describes changes in language, which regularly happen after the introduction of new communication technologies, identifying the pattern: repeated changes in ways of creation, replication and conceptualization of language. The article points out that the electronic stage, just like oral, written and printed stages, requires human effort to adjust language to its new environment. The author argues for human agency: language theory consciously formulated to lead the necessary changes. The author proposes a new discipline, language semiotics, which would study the processes of creation and replication in language in order to suggest successful solutions during the turning points, aka crisis situations in language history.
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- Articles
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Media-ecological engineering of the Soviets
By Andrey MirThis article explores the hypothesis that the Soviets built a society on the principles of media ecology. The media ecology of the Soviets had three sources: the materialistic (economic) determinism of Marxism, the environmentalism of Russian literature and the Bolsheviks’ goals of socialist upbuilding. Moreover, the determination to build a new society made Soviet ‘media ecology’ not just descriptive or critical but proactive. The Soviet media ecology could be nothing else but applied media ecology. The notion of media-ecological engineering is advanced in this article to describe the applied character of Soviet ‘media environmentalism’. The article is a part of a larger project, ‘The media ecology of socialism’, which aims at a media-ecological analysis of socialism in general and the Soviet mentality particularly.
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Free verse and speech texture
More LessBased on the theories of Yuri Rozhdestvensky, this article considers vers libres a ‘third’ genre: neither prose nor poetry, but a separate artistic form where prose and poetry intersect. As other types of speech, free verse is influenced by the changes in communication technologies. Using representative examples of Russian free verse, the article studies this influence. It traces the correlations between Russian vers libres and oral genres, including proverbs and fables, and between vers libre and written genres, specifically sacred texts: psalms and prayers. It explains the influence of print technology on free verse, shows that prose printed texts can be close to free verse, and explains why scientific texts, even well written, cannot. It demonstrates how Russian verlibrists responded to mass media styles and pressures, highlighting the use of irony. The patterns and regularities observed for the Russian material may be applicable to free verse in other languages, pending further research.
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The great symbol drain of Christianity: Neil Postman and the postmodern church
More LessThe postmodern church is one that embeds within it the trappings of the digital age. These institutions, whether manifesting as a megachurch with thousands of congregants or a humble emergent church with an intricate website and decent local following, tend to default to therapeutic modes of operating their churches; for instance, the implementation of stage lighting, projection screens or contemporary music serves to create an emotional response from congregants rather than one of spiritual reflection. This article seeks to understand the church in this current moment within a media ecological framework. First, it attends to the postmodern church, considering three major components that comprise the model: modern architecture, in-house technology, and internet and social media use. Next, the article attends to Neil Postman’s work, particularly Technopoly, Amusing Ourselves to Death, and an essay written in ETC: A Review of General Semantics about propaganda to understand the media ecological underpinnings of the digital age. Finally, the article addresses the implications of the postmodern church as made evident through Postman’s scholarship. Overall, this article seeks to address the question: ‘How can the work of media ecologists aid in the understanding of the postmodern, digitized church’, using Postman as the primary scholar of interest.
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The internet as a sacred and irrational space within the Ellulian milieu of ‘technique’
More LessThis article attempts to critically assess the concept of a ‘fourth milieu’ of ‘virtuality’ as possibly unique and distinct from Jacques Ellul’s technical milieu (the third of Ellul’s theoretical ‘three milieus’). The proposed fourth milieu challenges the very definition and boundary between ‘the real’ and the virtual, the rational and the irrational, the sacred and the profane, the human subject and the virtual subject. I argue that Ellul’s dialectical studies on the nature of ‘the word’ and ‘the image’ suggest that the internet is the space of the ‘irrational’ within the general ‘rational’ milieu that constitutes the technological organization of our society. Contrary to a ‘virtual’ milieu, I argue that the internet is the dialectical pole of ‘irrationality’, a parallel domain that exists in tension with the ‘rational’ pole of industrial society. Ellul’s concepts of the ‘sacred’ and ‘sacred of transgression’ contribute to the dialectical dynamics that are discussed in this article.
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The kind of problem a smart city is
More LessDigital technologies not only alter the material fabric of cities, but condition and constrain the complex networks of trust that emerge among neighbours and strangers as they engage one another in shared civic spaces. In this sense, a media ecology of the city would borrow from studies of urban sociology, political economy and cybernetics to reconsider what ethical implications smart technologies would have when sown into the fabric of an urban environment. This article introduces Jane Jacobs’s urban theory as a complexity approach to media ecology that provides insight into how urban environments, as media of communication and commerce, cultivate the ethical character of social relations among neighbours and strangers. It is argued that Jacobs’s urban theory provides sufficient ground for figuring the ethical implications of highly integrated and ubiquitous digital technologies within the organized complexity of urban environments and offers an alternative way of cultivating urban ecologies of communication.
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Towards an integrated theory of mediation: Combining postphenomenology and media ecology to understand the experience of location-based games
By Ale PrunottoThis article highlights the utility of combining postphenomenology and media ecology to understand how experience is mediated in the context of location-based games. While both conceptual approaches are concerned with mediation, their analytical toolkits have different and complementary emphases. Postphenomenology is particularly well suited to examining the nature of human–media relations, while media ecology encourages us to apprehend these human–media relations in the context of complex entanglements of relations. This holistic approach is essential to understand how practitioners of location-based games experience the world. Such experience is influenced by many factors, including other entities that participants encounter in the landscape, other participants, the rules and roles of the game and locative media infrastructures. In this article, I explore the processes by which one location-based game, geocaching, mediates experience of the landscape. To do so, I draw primarily on a case study from the fieldwork conducted with geocachers in Melbourne, Australia.
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Music technologies and AirPods: Considering Theodor Adorno as media ecologist
Authors: Scott Haden Church, Audrey Halversen and Brent YergensenWhen new technologies emerge, they inevitably bring to mind many of the same questions that media scholars have been asking for decades. In this study, we will analyse Apple AirPods through a theoretical framework based in the writings of media ecologists like Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, as well as media theorist Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno is included here because very few articles in media ecology scholarship discuss his contributions to media research. The exclusion of Adorno from media ecology appears to relate to his different ontological assumptions about media. While Innis, McLuhan and Postman contribute to the ‘structures and patterns narrative’ of medium theory, Adorno clearly fits into the ‘power and resistance narrative’ of critical/cultural studies. However, there are more significant connections between Adorno and the field of media ecology than have been previously acknowledged. In particular, there is a confluence between Adorno’s writings and others by media ecology scholars like Postman and Lewis Mumford, particularly in Adorno’s arguments about technology and music. In this article, we consider the question: can Adorno’s writings on technology be considered appropriate for inclusion in the media ecology canon? In this article, we will explore representative essays from Adorno’s extensive body of work on music reproduction technologies and discuss the parallels between his arguments and those made by others in media ecology.
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- Poetry
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- Probe
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- Pedagogy
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Rolly chairs and media ecology: Applying communication theory to the activity permissible classroom
More LessThis article addresses classroom furnishings from a media ecological perspective. I tell the story of how ‘buoy’ and ‘node’ chairs in an ‘activity permissible’ classroom ‘cooled-down’, complicated, and undermined the educational environment. In particular, I explain how the ‘message’ of these furnishings – the extensions afforded by their design – clashed with both pedagogical needs and the subject-matter of the course. I conclude that ‘activity permissible’ furnishings are not necessarily ‘better’ furnishings, and that the media ecology of furnishings is an essential consideration in the designing and assigning of classrooms.
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- Book Review
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McLuhan’s Techno-Sensorium City: Coming to Our Senses in a Programmed Environment, Jaqueline McLeod Rogers (2020)
More LessReview of: McLuhan’s Techno-Sensorium City: Coming to Our Senses in a Programmed Environment, Jaqueline McLeod Rogers (2020)
Washington, DC: Lexington Books, 192 pp.,
ISBN-13 978-1-79360-524-5, h/bk, USD 95.00
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 23 (2024)
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Volume 22 (2023)
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Volume 21 (2022)
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Volume 20 (2021)
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Volume 19 (2020)
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Volume 18 (2019)
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Volume 17 (2018)
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Volume 16 (2017)
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Volume 15 (2016)
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Volume 14 (2015)
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Volume 13 (2014)
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Volume 12 (2013)
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Volume 11 (2012)
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Volume 10 (2011)
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Volume 9 (2010)
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Volume 8 (2009)
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Volume 7 (2008)
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Volume 6 (2007)
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Volume 5 (2006)
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Volume 4 (2005)
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Volume 3 (2004)
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Volume 2 (2003)
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Volume 1 (2002)