Explorations in Media Ecology: Most Cited Articles http://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/eme?TRACK=RSS Please follow the links to view the content. Media ecology and hashtag activism: #Kaleidoscope http://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/eme.15.1.21_1?TRACK=RSS Abstract A new form of social change through social media is hasthag activism, in which activists draw attention to a specific cause by using a metadata tag, such as #BlackLivesMatter. This new mechanism for social change in our new media environment is questionable, and there is little understanding of what this type of activism creates. Media ecology offers insight into the possible consequences of engagement with hashtag activism and proposes ways we can understand how it alters our consciousness and behaviour. Using the metaphor of a kaleidoscope, we explore what hashtag activism offers, its multi-layered beauty as well as the dark side of this new media form. We examine how hashtag activism furthers (and doesn’t) democratic communication and participation and offer some directions for future research into these online forms of resistance. Heather Crandall and Carolyn M. Cunningham Sun Jun 05 17:50:41 UTC 2022Z Teaching as the emergent event of an ecological process: Complexity and choices in one-to-one programmes http://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/eme_00065_1?TRACK=RSS The article argues that the ecological approach can offer a viewpoint that comprises more educational complexity. If we accept that the observer and object of observation are in a constant relationship, that technology, context and culture are constituting forces of knowledge production, and that theory/practice is another binary divide to overcome, we are forced to address the intertwined emergence of teaching and learning as part of a co-evolutionary process. As part of ecological pedagogy, communication choices focus on feedback, interconnectedness and in-between-ness among living and non-living organisms. By drawing from the encounter between the complex perspective of Gregory Bateson and the thinking of media ecologist Marshall McLuhan, this article focuses on communication choices in teaching. It presents a comparative study on one-to-one programmes in schools in Italy and Brazil and shows the importance of existing connections and communicative exchanges between the elements of a dynamic system. Lyana Thédiga de Miranda and Magda Pischetola Sun Jun 05 23:55:09 UTC 2022Z Media Ecology Education http://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/eme.5.1.5_1?TRACK=RSS Abstract 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. Neil Postman Sun Jun 05 15:59:32 UTC 2022Z An Ecology of Natural Mindlessness: Solitude, Silence, and Transcendental Consciousness http://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/eme.10.1-2.55_1?TRACK=RSS This article attempts to define spirituality from a brain studies perspective. In holonomic and connectionist brain studies there are three possible forms of consciousness: objective, narrative, and transcendental. Objective consciousness concerns linearities, order, structure, sequentialities, linguistics, time keeping, and so on. This form of consciousness is detrimental to achieving a spirituality. Narrative consciousness is an extension of objective consciousness with the addition of metaphoria and aesthetic flow. Narrative consciousness concerns an aesthetics of silence, paralinearities, daydreaming, life stories, feelings, and the like. Solitude is necessary to achieving a deeper kind of silence because well-planned solitude helps to eliminate pervasive kinds of objective, everyday consciousness. Also, solitude is an escape from the "pathologies of speed" and clock insanities that are increasingly troublesome with an increasing exponential acceleration. Some suggestions for achieving spiritual and deeper kinds of silence within naturalistic, solitudinal environments are offered. Transcendental consciousness concerns a deep, meditative silence, or widespread, temporary cortical brain synchronizations. This more profound silence concerns deeply restful, narrative, and peaceful solitude, leading to possible synchronous brain processes, an extensive now-ness, a primitivation of time, and a sense of timelessness. I propose that these highly synchronous brain states are necessary to many kinds of spiritual journeys. TOM BRUNEAU Sun Nov 06 14:25:17 UTC 2022Z Time and Space on Skype: Families Experience Togetherness While Apart http://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/eme.10.3-4.303_1?TRACK=RSS Skype, a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) system, allows people to communicate through text, audio, and visual exchanges across short or great distances. At less than a decade old, it hosts the interaction of as many as 30 million people at one time (Skype, 2011). Its services, some free and others for fee-based, are especially valuable to fragmented families. This is despite the limits of technology to truly allow for "being" and "keeping" in touch while apart. Skype may create the illusion of being together because it brings distant sounds and images closer. However, it also may simultaneously emphasize the distance between people. The screen that draws us together also may keep us apart. Through phenomenology, the researcher presents some facets of the Skype experience. Particular attention is given to how families encounter time and space using a technology designed to overcome distant time and distant space. Almond Aguila Sun Nov 06 14:25:17 UTC 2022Z Diachronic phenomenology: A methodological thread within media ecology http://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/eme.13.1.9_1?TRACK=RSS Abstract This article identifies and outlines a method of thought and line of research that can be found throughout media ecology. The methodology and research line, ‘diachronic phenomenology’, explores the many ways that conscious life and social organization (in its essential dimensions, modalities, properties and functioning) resonates with particular environments and media forms, and correspondingly grows, develops and becomes itself. The article thus synthesizes and co-adapts media ecology and phenomenology: media ecology benefits from more robust phenomenological grounding and methodological considerations, while phenomenology benefits from recognizing how various noetic and eidetic economies, as well as invariant features of contemporary life, have been culturally and historically effected and affected by social environments and communicative forms (writing, currency, mirrors, clocks, drugs, etc.). The article walks through a wide range of samples and illustrations and then briefly identifies possible future directions by considering recent developments within the fields of brain science and embodied cognition. Corey Anton Sun Jun 05 16:04:53 UTC 2022Z Posthuman visions: Creating the technologized body http://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/eme.11.1.7_1?TRACK=RSS As medical technology continues to progress, we are able to correct deficiencies in the body through means such as cochlear implants and prosthetic limbs. This has led some scholars to argue that we are creating technologized, cyborg bodies.However,these technologies have also enabled us to correct perceived cultural flaws in the body. This article explores the nature of the body through the lens of posthumanism, examining ways that individuals attempt to reshape their bodies through cosmetic surgery and other forms of body modification. Specifically, this article examines the practice of hymen restoration,Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s artistic endeavours in cosmetic surgery and Stelarc’s cybernetic experimentations. These cases yield three potential visions of the body: the body must be restored; bodies must be unified; and the body must evolve. Such visions have consequences; the ways in which the body is rhetorically constructed influence how people choose to alter their own bodies. By considering the body itself as medium and as an interface with other technologies, we can better theorize what it truly means to be human. Brett Lunceford Thu Oct 20 08:00:47 UTC 2022Z The affect of the hashtag: #HandsUpDontShoot and the body in peril http://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/eme.15.1.33_1?TRACK=RSS Abstract On 9 August 2014, Michael Brown, a young man of barely 18 years, was killed by Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson, which renewed discourse surrounding the occurrences of racial violence in the United States enacted at the hands of police. Brown’s death led to the development of a hashtag movement called #HandsUpDontShoot on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, which critiqued the disparate treatment of racial minorities and the excessive use of (often deadly) force by police on black bodies. #HandsUpDontShoot offers an example how the convergence of subjectivities occurs affectively: the hashtag, while making a discursive appeal to consider Michael Brown’s rumoured stance of surrender when he was shot by Wilson, also featured photos of movement participants recreating his pose with their own bodies. Further, the embodied affect of the movement overlapped and entangled with that of offline spaces, where protesters on the ground in Ferguson and other communities began to raise their hands above their head in a desire to not only create an external spectacle of Brown’s victimhood, but to live within the subjectivity of his abject body. Through a media ecology analysis, I argue that the subjectivity of Brown’s body was kept alive through the movement, as the hashtag and associated imagery can be seen as material extensions of Michael Brown’s body and a desire to make sense of Brown’s death through an affective exchange with the body in peril. In this sense, the participants of #HandsUpDontShoot transformed the movement from a space for standing with the victim to a state of standing within the body in peril. Kate Drazner Hoyt Sun Jun 05 17:52:15 UTC 2022Z Renaissance Now! Media Ecology and the New Global Narrative http://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/eme.1.1.41_1?TRACK=RSS Abstract Douglas Rushkoff Sun Jun 05 15:54:52 UTC 2022Z Accountabilities of posthuman research http://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/eme_00050_7?TRACK=RSS Abstract What constitutes ‘good’ posthuman research? This article offers three dynamics to help assess the value of posthuman-inspired inquiry. We propose that a good posthuman research account should show evidence that the researcher: (1) attended to their own more-than-humanness and made explicit how they interviewed and attuned to the nonhuman things of their inquiry; (2) reassembled resemblings of the posthuman world by inventively weaving and fusing human and nonhuman storylines; and (3) offered analytic insights into the liveliness of posthuman research work as the performativity of difference. Terrie Lynn Thompson and Catherine Adams Sun Jun 05 21:29:13 UTC 2022Z