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Explorations in Media Ecology - Current Issue
Volume 23, Issue 4, 2024
- Editorial
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The power and potential of a great conversation
More LessThis editorial reflects on the interrelated elements of the media ecology community and the value of the ongoing, evolving conversation as it takes place in multiple forms, and as those different forms influence each other.
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- Articles
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Key technologies in the rise of the age of superabundance
By Corey AntonThis article addresses the nature of superabundance. It begins by reviewing how humanity is unique in its ability to bind-time and generate wealth. Drawing upon Alfred Korzybski, the article differentiates two kinds of wealth, potential use-values and kinetic use-values. It reveals the increasing acceleration of the uniquely human phenomenon of wealth by briefly exploring five different revolutions in history (e.g. cognitive, agricultural, industrial, digital and generative AI). It then illustrates how communication technologies, which are potent combinations of kinetic and potential use-values, are related to the rise of superabundance. The article introduces the concept of ‘symbolic inflation’ and argues that superabundance is neither pure boon nor pure bane. Our experiences of it come with a great deal of irresolvable ambiguity and ambivalence.
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The most precious possession: The place of analogy in the work of Marshall McLuhan
More LessThis 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.
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Eye of media ecology on AI
More LessThis 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!
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‘Be strong and let us be strong’: Erich Fromm and Lewis Mumford, the story of a friendship
By Zachary LoebLewis 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.
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Queer media ecology: A theory of disequilibrium and repair
By Yidong WangBuilding 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.
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- Probes
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When data is dangerous: Emerging media and abortion access work in post-Roe America
Authors: Jessica Gantt-Shafer and Stephanie Kraft SheleyIn this article, we question how increasingly invasive emerging technologies will continue to shape, shift, benefit and/or constrain social movement organizing. In particular, we refer to organizations involved in the current abortion access movement in post-Roe America. In this particular political climate, as the corporate demand for personal data grows alongside state surveillance, we wonder how organizations directly offering services, resources and information around abortion might continue to shift their practices. Time and again, technologies are wielded in innovative ways for liberation. However, we argue the rising popularity of ‘smart’ technologies presents unique challenges to the ongoing abortion access movement.
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On the uncertain certain: The politics of deepfakes in the counterpoise of the unthought
More LessFor 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’.
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Xu Bing’s pseudo Chinese and Sinified English as artistic mediums
By Peter ZhangThis 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.
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- Poetry
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Conjure
By Kate SiklosiConjure features a series of visual poems constructed in petri dishes using water, india ink, found objects, and fragments torn from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
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- Book Reviews
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Context Blindness: Digital Technology and the Next Stage of Human Evolution, Eva Berger (2022)
By Phil RoseReview of: Context Blindness: Digital Technology and the Next Stage of Human Evolution, Eva Berger (2022)
New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 146 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-43318-613-4, h/bk, USD 124.15
ISBN 978-1-43319-728-4, p/bk, USD 44.25
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Formal Cause in Marshall McLuhan’s Thinking: An Aristotelian Perspective, Laura Trujillo Liñán (2022)
More LessReview 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
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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)
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