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Explorations in Media Ecology - Current Issue

Volume 22, Issue 1

Volume 22, Issue 1, 2023

  • Articles

      • Comparative study on digital inclusion among socially vulnerable activists and leaderships of organized social movements in Brazil

        https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00147_1

        This article analyses the challenges experienced by activists with social vulnerabilities who continued their activism online or face-to-face during the pandemic, focusing especially on Black and Indigenous women. I have also studied the types of resistance found in the period between March 2020 and July 2021. On the other hand, I will analyse leaders of organized social movements – or those in the process of formalization – to understand how these leaders organized themselves in the digital world. This qualitative and quantitative research was carried out through online questionnaires and online focus groups composed by activists with social vulnerabilities and leaders of organized social movements in different parts of Brazil. Due to a long period of turmoil, social division, self-isolation and perpetual stress have become the daily norm in our country. As we faced various political conflicts and social trials, the strength of our relationships and associations allowed us to endure. This research will also follow the digital difficulties in Brazil, finding levels of partial and total digital exclusion among the analysed groups. Despite the difficulties of navigating the digital world, activists and leaders of Brazilian social movements sought alternatives through resistance and solidarity, including sharing access to the internet via cell phones. This reflection is based on the research finished in December 2021 for the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation.

    • Media ecology and change communication: Similarities, differences and opportunities for real-world synergies

      https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00148_1

      A Media Ecology/Formal Cause Communication Model appears to have parallels with strategic/change communication offering means of exploring different but related areas of study and practice. Particularly, change communication continues to be critical in technology adoption whereas media ecology concerns ‘confronting technopoly’ and countering the surrender of culture to technology. A ‘change curve’, has had its own origins and part in the change communication process. However, media ecology’s particular communication focus appears based on maintaining human values in the face of such change. This article attends to the elements of change communication and technopoly confrontation through a review of related references. It discusses learning found in comparing strengths and opportunities. It suggests combining/reinterpreting pertinent processes for pursuing real-world synergies. Finally, the article proposes ‘remediating media’ process use proceeding in the aftermath of COVID-19 and international conflict.

    • Navigating the Eisenhower Interstate System: Paving the way for cyberspace

      https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00149_1

      This project discerns an early cybernetic paradigm for the internet in the worldwide movement towards uninterrupted motor travel that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Freeway designers, especially in Germany and the United States, pursued utopias of control over nature, independence from the topography of a particular locale and unrestricted transportation on a national scale. As a physical analogue of the digital landscape that would follow it, the execution of the Eisenhower Interstate System prioritized modern technological values in real space that went on to guide the design of virtual space. Moreover, in recent years physical and virtual transportation networks have become even more closely linked through location-based social navigation technologies such as Waze and Google Maps. Located at the intersection, or rather at the interchange, of media ecology and urban communication, this project seeks to illuminate the utopias of design that guide real and virtual space in the era of the interstate and the internet, with ramifications for those who seek to navigate them thoughtfully in the twenty-first century.

    • Weakness exploitation: Predicting socially communicative devices as a successor to internet-based graphical user interfaces

      Authors: Jamy Li and Mark Chignell
      https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00150_1

      Existing theories of technology transitions cannot predict what new technological paradigm will supplant the currently leading, internet-enabled graphical user interface paradigm. This article introduces a preliminary approach (‘weakness exploitation’) to explain the rise and fall of four technology ‘empires’: print, television, the internet and socially interactive devices (such as robots, chatbots and internet of things devices). The approach is related to technology diffusion and disruptive innovation, but with a predictive element induced from Marshall McLuhan’s descriptions of print and television as ‘extensions’ of the senses. It is applied to the internet as an historical example of a technology transition outside of McLuhan’s original analysis and to explain why excessive exposure to screen-rendered digital media as the internet’s exclusive access point may be replaced by a new ‘age’ of computationally intelligent, socially communicative devices. This new approach can help researchers and technologists conceptualize transitions between usage of incumbent and emerging technologies.

  • Poetry

      • From ‘Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings’

        https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00152_7

        Inscribing what Levinas might call ‘espace vital’ (the space we can survive), ‘Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings’, (written/composed by Adeena Karasick and visualized/designed by Warren Lehrer), is an ecstatically wrought, never quite post-COVID-19 celebration/exploration of openings. It tracks the pain of openings read through socio-economic, geographic and bodily space. Employing fragmentation, layered language and sonic wordplay, these excerpts explore a range of intralingual etymologies of the word ‘opening’, laced with post-consumerist ironic and erotic language, theoretical discourse, philosophical and Kabbalistic aphorisms, ‘Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings’ foregrounds language as a material, physical organism of hope – highlighting the concept of opening as an ever-swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and codes transporting us through passion, politics and pleasure as we negotiate loss and light. The full volume is forthcoming from Lavender Ink Press, Spring 2023.

  • Pedagogy

      • Four laws of Microsoft Teams

        https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00153_7

        The COVID-19 pandemic caused many schools around the globe to close their doors and relocate learning to virtual environments. Teachers were forced to transition the way they educated – from classroom to computer screen, from co-presence to distance, from hands on to hands off. High school teachers in New Brunswick turned to Microsoft Teams to help safely educate students from a distance. To investigate how Teams uniquely influenced the way teachers constructed, presented and shared knowledge, and how students responded to these approaches, I interviewed eight New Brunswick high school educators who taught in the Teams virtual environment during the 2020–21 school year, the first full school year of the pandemic. This article provides insight into some of the potential impositions and pedagogical constraints Teams placed on teaching practices; in what sense the software guided or limited teacher pedagogy and what challenges and opportunities teachers and students experienced; in what ways Teams might be reshaping ways of thinking, feeling, acting and knowing. As an approach to this investigation, Marshall and Eric McLuhan’s Laws of Media (1988) are employed as an inquiry mechanism by which the generalizable rules, patterns and structures of Teams can be recognized and studied. Through these conversations, I observed the enhancement of anytime/anywhere learning; the obsolescence of the physical classroom; the retrieval of lectures; the reversal of connectedness to disconnectedness. The Laws of Media allow education reformers to gain insight into the effects of using Teams as an educational tool before cultural norms and practices become too entrenched in the system, affording education districts and departments time to understand them and make a judgement on if, how and when Teams will be used.

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