MEDIA ECOLOGY

THEORY
Marshall McLuhan
 The media must be understood ecologically.
Changes in communication technology alter the
symbolic environment—the socially constructed,
sensory world of meanings. We shaped our tools—
the phonetic alphabet, printing press, and telegraph
—and they in turn have shaped our perceptions,
experiences, attitudes, and behavior. Thus the
medium is the message. (Socio-cultural tradition)
Environments
 Any understanding of social and cultural change is
impossible without knowledge of the way media
work as environments.
 All environments are inherently intangible and
interrelated.
Invisibility of environments
 We have trouble recognizing “the way media work
as environments” because we’re so immersed in
them.
 We need to focus on our everyday experience of
technology.
 A medium shapes us because we partake of it over
and over until it becomes an extension of ourselves.
 It’s the ordinariness of media that makes them
invisible.
Complexity of environments
 Understanding the influential relationship between
the media environment and society is a subtle but
crucial endeavor that demands a complex sense of
both incremental and sudden changes.
 McLuhan traces the major ecological shifts in
media throughout human history.
Tribal Age
 An acoustic place in history
 The senses of hearing, touch, taste, and smell were
more advanced than visualization.
 “Primitive” people lived richer lives than their
literate descendants because the ear does not select.
 People acted with more passion and spontaneity.
The age of literacy
 A visual point of view.
 Literacy moved people from collective tribal
involvement to private detachment.
 Literacy encouraged logical, linear thinking, and
fostered mathematics, science, and philosophy.
The print age
 Prototype of the industrial revolution.
 The printing press made visual dependence
widespread.
 The development of fixed national languages
produced nationalism.
 McLuhan regarded the fragmentation of society as
the most significant outcome of print.
The electronic age
 The rise of the global village.
 McLuhan believed that the electronic media are
retribalizing humanity.
 In an electronic age, privacy is a luxury or a curse
of the past.
 Linear logic is useless in the electronic society; we
focus on what we feel.
The digital age?
 Rewiring the global village
 The digital age is wholly electronic.
 The mass age of electronic media is becoming
increasingly personalized.