Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2006

In a keynote address delivered to the Speech Communication Association in 1973, Neil Postman discussed the new graduate program in media ecology that he established in New York University's School of Education. Media ecology is presented as a field of inquiry based on the metaphor that all communication is an environment, and utilizing a methodology called context analysis. Discussing communication environments as systems with boundaries, in relation to suprasystems and subsystems, Postman also considered the question of how technology affects human perception, feeling, and value.

This remembrance recalls the creation and development of the Media Ecology Graduate Program at New York University as an exploration into the unknown. It provides some human faces to the faculty and students who shaped and were shaped by untraditional approaches to understanding media as environments in which cultures grow.

The following remarks are a personal memoir of Neil Postman as a colleague and teacher at New York University.

The following remarks are a personal memoir of Neil Postman as a colleague at New York University.

The following remarks are a personal memoir of Neil Postman as a colleague at New York University, and of his relationship to Charles Weingartner, with whom he coauthored four books.

Donald Wood writes from a unique perspective in his tribute to Neil Postman. Although he never had the opportunity to meet Postman in person, Wood traces the overwhelming influence the godfather of media ecology has had on his own professional career over a 40-year span. Through his books, some correspondence, and a few phone conversations, Postman shaped Wood's professional career and strongly determined the direction of two of his books—including writing the foreword to one of them.

This essay presents an examination of six English-language education textbooks, targeted to students in Grades 7–12, that Neil Postman either authored or co-authored during the 1960s. The books, which were published as a series entitled The New English, by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, are often overlooked by, and even unknown to, many students and scholars of Postman’s work. This essay seeks to redress the absence of these books in many scholarly treatments of Postman’s work, including and especially treatments focused on the development of his ideas across the span of his career. The essay also presents the claim that these books are of substantial significance in the evolution of Postman’s ideas and writing, in the overall contributions he has made, and in the value they offer to the field of media ecology.

American evangelicalism finds its roots in the Great Awakening of the 18th century, a movement that has proven to be both multifaceted and populist. The early half of the 20th century saw evangelicalism marginalized from cultural powerbrokers, only to resurface again in the later 20th century as a political force. Nevertheless, evangelicals today as a whole still mirror the same entrepreneurial, individualistic, and pragmatic values that have been part and parcel of American enterprise, a bustle now gone hyperconsumer. Not all evangelicals are oblivious to the reshaping of Old World Protestant sensibilities by mass culture forces. Confessionalists, as named in this article, are fully aware of how media forms can shape cultural institutions like the Church. Neil Postman’s ideas have been useful to evangelicals who understand that the Christian faith, like the Jewish faith, is logocentric. Although Postman’s Enlightenment values sometimes clash with the values of those who lay claim to the Protestant Reformation, both have much in common.

Best known as a prolific writer of social criticism, Neil Postman was also a master of public speaking, an art he considered worthy of special attention and too often neglected. So dear was public speaking to him that Postman developed a set of ten rules for giving a good speech. Postman never published these guidelines, instead passing them on to his students in classroom lectures. The following is a reconstruction of Postman’s rules of public speaking, based on his own personal notes complemented by notes taken during his lectures. The author originally delivered this reconstruction in June 2005, at the Sixth Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association.

Misunderstanding is common in teaching and presents teachers with opportunities to better understand their material and their teaching. Three common misunderstandings of Neil Postman are discussed in this article, along with their causes and corrections.

This article is based on the premise that media ecology was Neil Postman's most significant and lasting achievement. Beginning with Postman's formal introduction of the term media ecology at the 58th annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, which was held in Milwaukee in 1968, this article discusses the coining of the term and its diffusion. Postman's definition and interpretations of media ecology are then considered, followed by a discussion of the ways in which Postman considered media ecology to be a form of praxis and, in effect, a moral ecology.