media ecology

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Niall Flynn

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Britannica Editors

History

Media ecology, in its distinct North American and European contexts, develops biological ecology by emphasizing interactions between instances of technological mediation in cultural, communicational, and artistic contexts; it is a research field that treats media systems as environments. It moves beyond the traditional linear model of communication and media studies, which focuses on the effects of media, by claiming that we can only make sense of things around us by considering their interactive relationships. Media ecology is both a theoretical commitment and a methodological approach to media: We can analyze specific media ecologies, and we can engage in media-ecological thinking, all the while asserting processes of mediation as basic to the study of media. By intervening in mainstream debates, which typically consider media artifacts and objects, this perspective claims a more holistic understanding of media, as well as the diverse exterior systems they are entangled with.

Mediation consists of a dynamic network of flows. These flows interact in multiple ways, and it is their constitution of media ecosystems that is emphasized. Media ecology highlights the extent to which mainstream media studies have been uninterested in technological issues as well as the biological–technological relationship. Technology and media are not exactly synonymous in media ecology, but they share many equivalences. Its conceptualization of the close relations between human and machine is not new. It draws on philosophical traditions and approaches to society that have mostly been ignored by media studies. This is a critical rethinking that shifts attention from the meaning and function of media, which are subsequent categories, to their energies and flows, which are dynamic and, to some extent, unable to be categorized. Ecological thought considers unities and balances along with conflicts, instabilities, and other dynamics. It does not claim media as fully discernible and comprehensible objects, but rather as shifting sets of emergent processes within a dynamic network, not so much a study of things, but of their relations. As such, media ecology is a general theory of media and communication technologies that does not privilege individual media in its analysis. There have been several perspectives, with distinct North American and European contexts.

Initial Media Ecology

Although the term itself was not used until near the end of the 1960s, media ecology was popularized as a critical method and approach in North America after the 1964 publication of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. Ideas from this book, concerning the significance of interactions and interrelations between media, underlie much inquiry in this field. Its emphasis on the dynamic rather than static elements of media has proved insightful and prescient. Media ecology, as it was institutionalized after the initial excitement it induced, went on to deploy environmental concepts, such as evolution, ecosystems, and environments, in order to examine the effects of media systems on humans—both as individuals and as parts of society. This metaphorical device allows us some understanding of the technologically mediated world around us. By focusing on processes of interaction and interrelation, it is able to examine aspects of mediation that previous media and communications frameworks failed to take into account. Media ecology thus analyzes variable and contingent effects of media. It does this by developing theories of technology that build upon prevailing ideas about technology’s function and effects on humans.

Through technology, the physical capabilities of the human body are extended. Media ecology brought a new perspective to bear on this extension and the social and individual conditions it generated. It focused on the dialectic between humans and technology by questioning the extent to which one determined the other. Humans contend with a vast array of technological and natural systems, among which human agency and the capacity to act were approached with new uncertainty. This form of technological determinism provided crucial insights into life among modern technological systems, as well as much older systems such as language and writing. In this perspective, the effects on the human body and consciousness were the chief matters at hand. Although moving beyond linear models of communication and media, media ecology in its North American iteration was still rooted in the traditional discipline. In the light of later developments that pushed its ideas in new directions, it has been criticized for relying on dominant humanist philosophies, which now seem to clash with its intentions to describe the variety of life among technological systems.

New Directions

This field of study has become more fragmentary and diverse in approaches, especially in Europe, since the mid-2000s. The term’s pluralization—media ecologies—reveals a number of new concerns and interpretations of its significance. Its primarily metaphorical usage has been displaced by transverse and transdisciplinary intentions to elaborate various ecological forms of thought. If the North American tradition followed insights in media studies, the more recent iterations follow developments in systems thinking and continental philosophy. Theoretical assumptions about the human’s hierarchical position have been disputed. This framework shifts emphasis from humans, as the focus of interactions between multiple technological and natural systems, toward nonhuman forms of agency in the world. If ecological environments structure our expression and capacity for action, media environments similarly undermine human forms of agency and rationality. Technology, for its part, is now seen as a basic category of the human; it is inseparable from us. This rethinking of the human owes much to philosophical developments that pose it as a more unstable category. Distinctions between nature and culture and human and machine have been unsettled. In this way, media ecologies have become not just an interrogation of contemporary media transformations, where hybrid media networks and dynamic systems entangle, but also an examination of the processes of technological mediation.

North American media ecology examines the interactions between technological systems in order to explain their effects on humans. Recent European developments seek to describe a network of human, nonhuman, machine, and assemblages of each, without privileging any category. System is now the operative term. This involves approaching objects of study from any number of scales: from microbial, to geological, to global, and everything in between. The material aspects of such processes are insisted upon. It does not propose matter as a static object, but as a living and transformative thing, which exists before and beyond categorization. Such an ambitious project calls for a rethinking of our theoretical resources, which are predominantly human-centric. Media ecologies thus involve an ethical imperative: to reflect upon what lies beyond the human in order to understand what mediation involves. But fixed understanding is not the conclusion of this project; it is a waypoint in the movement toward an ecological thought. Reality begins to appear differently in this context.

Media-ecological thought has taken on a radical impetus in its attempts to consider the rich multiplicity of life in mediated environments. Its strategies are reflexive and speculative. The ecological metaphor has been assimilated to some extent, but interpretative metaphors have their limits. A more holistic ecological approach emerges by proceeding with the examination of material elements, rather than solely by analogy. The North American tradition and recent diversifications operate alongside each other, with institutional representation, associations, and publishing active in each. The field continues to develop fresh orientations, alongside broader theoretical reassessments of materiality, life, and mediation, and its implications are subject to lively debate.

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