Media Ecology and How It Influences Media

Task 1:

What is it?

• Media ecology aims to describe ways in which diverse media environments shape today's society and our everyday lives.
• It relates to the theoretical framework that deals with the multifaceted relationship between media and society
• The central premise of this is that the communication content doesn't exert nearly as much influence as the medium of communication itself does.

Origins:

• The phrase was officially introduced and coined in 1968 by the media theorist Neil Postman
• However, what initially inspired the phrase was Marshall McLuhan's theory proposed in his 1964 book, 'Understanding Media'
• McLuhan was the first to suggest that the focus of the study should be media and not the content it communicates
  
  

Media as Environments:

• Postman, Nystrom and Strate have defined media ecology in quite similar ways. They suggest that media, or rather, a medium in a technological context; the environment that consists of communication systems within which we live, and which shape our culture. This environment inevitably affects our perceptions, feelings, values and beliefs
• Media ecology is also based on feedback that flows back and forth between an environment and a medium. Mediums receive data, processes it, and returns it to the environment, which in turn processes that output, and returns the new data to the medium
• Thus, media ecology studies the reciprocal relationship between media as an environment, and language, technology, and culture of society

Influence of Media Environments:

• Media Ecology is so relevant today because it's impossible to understand cultural and social change without analyzing the mechanisms of media environments we live in
• This means that we experience and perceive everyday life through the lens of various media, such as films, internet, digital media, and TV. These mediums give us info about the world and the environment we live in; they provide us with knowledge about what is and isn't aceptable
• They are also influenced and dependent on technology, culture and language, and having access to the internet as it is the primary form of communication technology today

Digital Media:

• Our present day environment is the digital media environment. This means our communications media is no longer controlled by journalists, production, TV, and advertising companies
• Internet access has enabled everyone to create and access all kinds of content, and consequently shape the environment they live in
• Media ecology is a complex field of study that seeks to explain the ways media environments affect and shape our lives. It places the digital environment of today as a space of constant interaction between people, and diverse media that are products of our technological reality

Task 2:

Marshall McLuhan's Theory:

• 'The medium is the message' - a deliberately paradoxical statement
• he argued that throughout history what has been communicated (message) has been less important that the particular medium through which people communicate
• E.g. the shift from verbal cultures to print based ones. McLuhan thought the printed word encouraged an emphasis on the visual whereas in earlier verbal cultures when speech was everything, the dominant sense organ was the ear
• He thought the telegraph, radio, TV, the telephone were unifying people and encouraging participation though at the expense of greater conformity
• This resulted in the emergence of a global village, which then can lead to the introduction of the internet