Explorations in Media Ecology - Current Issue

This article explores how analogy informed the work of Marshall McLuhan. Analogy helped McLuhan to make his discoveries and to argue his points. It also played a critical role in his philosophical realism. Through consideration of analogy in its various modes, the reader of this article will learn how the analogy of improper proportionality (also known as metaphor) differs from the analogy of proper proportionality, a term that frequently appears across McLuhan’s works. This extended reflection on analogy has important implications for the study of metaphor, metaphysics and media ecological praxis.

This article contends that the field of media ecology offers the most insightful, historical and comprehensive way of understanding the broad implications of artificial intelligence (AI). With the release of AI into the world, we do not have the same world plus AI; we have a new, rapidly changing, hyper sort of world fraught with concern regarding the unpredictability of this latest modern-tech marvel. Technological advancement and societal change are inseparable dynamics within an ever-evolving ecology of media. That is, they are mutually inclusive. ‘Eye of Media Ecology on AI’ sets forth the premise that an ecological approach to understanding media offers the most inclusive, prescient and humane way of assessing the sweeping cultural and generative rise of ai. Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism – the medium is the message – holds true, even in our risky age of AI. The axiom acts as a kind of indisputable law etched in techno-modernity. Yet, AI presents a ponderous twist to McLuhan’s oft-quoted principle. In truth, AI is both medium and message, a medium that carries messages but also a medium that messages. That is new; that is different; that is unnerving. Nevertheless, this dual reality does not wash away McLuhan’s tenet. On the contrary, McLuhan’s concept extends and embraces AI’s twofold wizardry. In McLuhan parlance, one can rightly say that the medium that messages is the message!

Lewis Mumford and Erich Fromm are amongst the twentieth century’s fiercest social critics. While their respective oeuvres feature frequent citations and references to each other, their correspondence with provides insight into a friendship based not only on mutual interests but also on deep mutual affection. Mumford and Fromm shared rough drafts and ideas with one another, but they also encouraged each other to keep writing. And though each of them wrote at length about the importance of community, both struggled with feelings of isolation and expressed doubts about whether their work was having any impact. Drawing on original archival research, this article explores how Mumford and Fromm cultivated and sustained their community of two. Both worried that their warnings were not being heard – and yet, their friendship reveals, that they drew comfort from knowing they were at least hearing each other.

Building on the conversation to centre critical perspectives, including queer and feminist epistemologies, in media ecology studies, this article explores a pathway to a theoretical understanding of disequilibrium and an ethical commitment to repair through a framework I call ‘queer media ecology’. I define queer media ecology as the study of how power discrepancies, technological disconnections, constrained visibility and affective ambiguity disrupt the apparent status of heteronormative equilibrium around media production and reveal opportunities for reparative queer politics. I further propose three analytical scaffolds for queer media ecology: (1) actors and networks, (2) infrastructures and contingencies and (3) intersectionality. Queering media ecology is a critical intervention that articulates the power dynamics around who has visibility, how culture is represented, and what norms of natural vs. unnatural dictate social relationships in a communication system.

For McLuhan, ‘all media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values’. Particularly in the wake of AI Chatbots, agents, avatars and simulations, surveillance capitalism, webscraping and strip-mining, conflict has erupted between scientific and non-scientific epistemologies and forms of truth – and ‘fact’ refracted as a slippery ellipses of attestation and testimony. When ‘authority’ is indeterminable; when we have no access to epistemic privilege to who or what is coding, coating, adjudicating; who has expertise when expertise is a discursive process – the question to be addressed is not how do we determine what is true, real, authentic or certain, but how do we collectively negotiate this ever-expanding digital plenitude, taking into account, á la Postman, ways each medium (or platform) ‘calls forth and amplifies certain cognitive, emotional, social, political, economic and aesthetic uses, responses and values’. Techno-aesthetically contextualized within Terry Moran’s ‘graphic revolution’, as read through my highly satiric 2017–23, Checking In; this probe exposes how when we have no access to epistemic privilege, ‘reality’ becomes an unfixed re-mix; a nexus of excessive axes – enacting the Wittgensteinian axiom, that, ‘at the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded’.

This article speculates on the artistic rationale and mediumistic significance of Xu Bing’s pseudo Chinese script and Sinified English script. The former demonstrates that a text does not have to be comprehensible to be functional. The latter is provocative in the sense that it gives an alphabetic language a seemingly pictographic and calligraphic look, and points in the direction of the potential becoming-paratactic of an intrinsically hypotactic language. It may not be a pure coincidence that Xu Bing’s Sinified English emerged in a post-alphabetic age.

Review of: Formal Cause in Marshall McLuhan’s Thinking: An Aristotelian Perspective, Laura Trujillo Liñán (2022)

New York: Institute of General Semantics, 132 pp.,

ISBN-13 978-1-97016-418-3, p/bk, USD 18.00

Context Blindness: Digital Technology and the Next Stage of Human Evolution, Eva Berger (2022)

New York: Peter Lang, 146 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-43318-613-4, h/bk, USD 124.15