media ecology.docx

From the perspective of media ecology, the internet - as an intrinsic part of digital society - is a medium because it is an environment. And conversely, it is an environment because it is a medium. Media ecologists such as McLuhan (1964) and media theorist Neil Postman (1970) have maintained that m...

From the perspective of media ecology, the internet - as an intrinsic part of digital society - is a medium because it is an environment. And conversely, it is an environment because it is a medium. Media ecologists such as McLuhan (1964) and media theorist Neil Postman (1970) have maintained that media must be defined as something more wide-ranging than the traditional informational devices, such as radio, television, newspaper, movies, sound records, computers, and so on. Instead, they argued, a medium is any symbolic structure, or social environment, that in some way, and under certain circumstances, defines human interaction and the production of culture. From this perspective, a newspaper is a medium because it provides us with a certain way of relating to the world - through print text, still images, and certain journalistic genres and conventions. It also establishes limits, as a conventional printed newspaper does not allow for things like moving images, sounds, and online reader comments. In a similar way, from a media ecology perspective, coffee-houses, bowling alleys, and classrooms are also media, for the same reasons: they offer certain ways of relating to the world, while at the same time establishing boundaries for what can be said, done, expressed, learnt, or achieved. Sociologically speaking, this means that media, like the internet, are social structures. Social structures offer resources - symbolic and others - that people can draw upon while doing things in society (Giddens 1984). This is also similar to what social psychologist Erving Goffman (1959) argued with his \'dramaturgical\' perspective on interaction. People in society enter different roles and stages, while performing socially with a degree of agency, but always in relation to certain limitations or expectations. The environment of the interaction thus affects what we do, and how we do it. From the perspective of media ecology, media - such as the internet and its various incarnations and platforms - are such environments: symbolic structures within which we are situated and through which we engage. This situatedness and embeddedness happens on two levels. First, there is the sensorial level, where things like a Facebook page, a Twitter profile, a TikTok video, or an Instagram feed each employ our senses in different ways, much like reading is visual, radio is auditory, and video games are visual and auditory, as well as tactile. In a way, the reality we sense is constructed or reconstructed through the medium at hand. Famously, McLuhan (1964: 35) defined media as \'extensions\' of our senses that decide how people experience and become aware of the world around them. This also relates to what McLuhan meant when he, even more famously, declared that \'the medium is the message\'. Switching from one medium to another reconfigures our senses and alters the ways in which we comprehend and reconstruct the world around us. Second, there is the symbolic level, at which every medium is constituted by a certain systematic set of rules and codes in the form of vocabulary, grammar, and other conventions. While a director creating a film has to master and relate to certain cinematic vocabularies, posting an Instagram photo might similarly require knowledge of conventions such as using hashtags and applying filters. And this is not mainly about knowing how to apply the filter or type the hashtag, but about mastering the social rules for when to use them and how to make them mean certain things. As we learn these skills or attitudes, we are at the same time socialised and acculturated into the symbolic environment of the medium. In this sense, a medium is quite similar to a language or a culture that is used to make sense of the world. Media ecologists talk of some major changes throughout history and how these introduced crucial social transformations. The shift from a culture of talking to a culture of writing meant that the elders\' role as experts and unique sources of knowledge diminished. The introduction of the printing press meant a further democratisation of information, and the arrival of electronic for more ebook/ testbank/ solution manuals requests: email 960126734\@qq.com media contributed even more to balancing the temporal, spatial, and symbolic constraints for who could speak, where and when, and to whom. Today, we live in a world with a growing number of co-existing media, which means that we relate not to one, but to a combination of several environments. It is not sensible to conceive the internet as part writing, part still image, part moving image, part sound, part computer, part telephone, part television, and so on. Rather, it must be approached as a whole, and then as a whole that might be more than the sum of its parts. While the content of radio, television, or the internet might be a football game or a political debate, the message - in McLuhan\'s terms - of each of these media is not that. The message is instead equal to the social changes that a medium generates. McLuhan (1964: 20) wrote that \'the \"message\" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs\'. He also argued that the content of a medium is always another medium: the content of television might be the medium of a theatrical play, the medium of football, and so on. He wanted to make the point that by just studying the content, we risk becoming entangled in this spiral of media within media within media. It was therefore better, he thought, to instead focus on understanding media in terms of the ways in which they transform the social.