Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2004

A highly idiosyncratic and poetic meditation upon attention, this essay considers the phrase, walking mornings, as a complex of possibility framing a reconsideration of technological theories, practices, histories, and futures. Among the many superlatives with which digital culture and commerce bestows itself, the essay claims, we may perhaps add, that never before have human beings been as surrounded as we are now by so much empty possibility. Never before has there been such potentiality harnessed only to displaying itself. In highly personal terms, the essay considers how we might recover a certain necessary silence in the face of a horizon of infinity, how to attend beyond the distractions of the foreground. Walking mornings is a trope for possibility, moving through gathering potentialities, turning and returning toward endlessness within the silence of ourselves.

This article develops a social scientific approach for the empirical testing of media as environment form effects. The theoretical origins of this work merges McLuhan’s thoughts on micro-level media form influence and recent advances in the study of embodied cognition. A social scientific assessment of medium theory is provided, followed by an overview of an embodied approach to the study of media forms. The major concepts of the theory are defined, and the processes by which the physical environments created by media help to shape form-based cognitive schemata are detailed. Eight axioms are presented that form a basis for an embodied approach to the study of media forms, and an outline is provided for how media scholars can begin a more systematic empirical examination of media as environment form effects at the individual level of analysis.

This Internet probe utilizes Postman’s concept that “all technological change is a Faustian Bargain” to explore online interpersonal relationships. By applying the media ecological concepts of message direction, symbolic form, and the conditions of attendance, this probe discusses the ways in which the Internet’s media environment fosters both positive and negative human behavior patterns.

Bishop, John. Oh What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me. Dir. John Bishop. Prod. John Bishop and Harald Prins. Videocassette. Media Generation/Documentary Educational Resources. 2003. 270 pp. 52 min..

Cavell, Richard. McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 322 pp. Cloth $65.00, ISBN 0-802-03610-4. Paper $29.95, ISBN 0-802-08658-6.

Crowley, David, and Paul Heyer, eds. Comunication in History: Technology, Culture, Society (4th ed.). Boston: Pearson Allyn and Bacon, 2003. 352 pp. Paper $76.00, ISBN 0-321-08805-0.

Ozersky, Josh. Archie Bunker’s America: TV in an Era of Change, 1968-1978. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. 194 pp. Cloth $45.00, ISBN 0-80932-507-1.

Heyer, Paul. Harold Innis. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. 176 pp. Cloth $65.00, ISBN 0-742-52483-3. Paper $21.95, ISBN 0-742-52484-1.

Kaha White, C. Media and the Communication Matrix. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2003. 193 pp. Paper $24.95, ISBN 0-820-46177-6

Lavery, David, ed. This Thing of Ours: Investigating the Sopranos. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 225 pp. Cloth $60.00, ISBN 0-231-12780-4. Paper $17.95, ISBN 0-231-12781-2.