Media ecology
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Media ecology involves the study of information environments. According to the Media Ecology Association, media ecology can be defined as "the study of the complex set of relationships or interrelationships among symbols, media and culture."
In 1977, Marshall McLuhan said that media ecology "means arranging various media to help each other so they won't cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages. And so you can do some things on some media that you cannot do on others. And, therefore, if you watch the whole field, you can prevent this waste that comes by one canceling the other out." (Source: Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, by Marshall McLuhan, edited by Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, Foreword by Tom Wolfe. MIT Press, 2004)
In 1971, Neil Postman founded the Program in Media Ecology at the Steinhardt School of Education of New York University. He described it as
- Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people.
Changing uses
Recently, however, the term media ecology has been used in a mass media context for something quite different - the description of media industry developments and how they affect the public. This is particularly acute in Asia, where the term is often used business and consumer context.
See also
External links
- Media Ecology Association (http://www.media-ecology.org/about/constitution.html)
- Department of Culture and Communication (http://education.nyu.edu/dcc/), New York University