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ABSTRACT
Media ecology has been regarded as a field of inquiry that can be defined as the study of media as environments. This definition indicates that media ecology can be understood as a particular approach to studying media, and it also follows that media ecology can be defined as a particular way of studying environments, the study of environments as media. Understood as a philosophical pursuit, albeit one that is not reducible to the formal discipline of philosophy, media ecology can be viewed as an approach to understanding the human condition. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s three categories of human activity—labor, work, and action—this article examines how they can be situated within three types of environment or media—the biophysical, the technological, and the symbolic.
Notes
* This article is based on and draws upon my recently published book, Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition (New York: Peter Lang, 2017).
1 Neil Postman, “Growing Up Relevant” (address, National Council of Teachers of English Annual convention, Milwaukee, WI, November 29, 1968); “The Reformed English Curriculum,” in High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education, ed. Alvin C. Eurich (New York: Pitman, 1970), 160–68.
2 Postman, “The Reformed English Curriculum,” 163.
3 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964).
4 Postman, “The Reformed English Curriculum,” 161.
5 Terence P. Moran, “Media Ecology as an Instrument of Exploration,” Explorations in Media Ecology 5, no. 1 (2006): 15–22.
6 Amos H. Hawley, Human Ecology: A Theoretical Essay (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 10–11.
7 Lance Strate, On the Binding Biases of Time and Other Essays on General Semantics and Media Ecology (Fort Worth, TX: Institute of General Semantics, 2011).
8 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 1.
9 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 7.
10 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Critical Edition, ed. W. Terrence Gordon (Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, 2003), 12.
11 Neil Postman, Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble about Language, Technology, and Education (New York: Knopf, 1988), 5.
12 Ibid., 17.
13 Ibid., 18–19.
14 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (New York: Pantheon, 1996); Corey Anton, Selfhood and Authenticity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); Sources of Significance: Worldly Rejuvenation and Neo-Stoic Heroism (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2010); Communication Uncovered: General Semantics and Media Ecology (Forest Hills, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2011); Corey Anton, Robert K. Logan, and Lance Strate, eds., Taking Up McLuhan’s Cause: Perspectives on Formal Causality and Media Ecology (Chicago: Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2017); Corey Anton and Lance Strate, eds., Korzybski and … . (Forest Hills, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2012); Peter K. Fallon, The Metaphysics of Media: Toward an End to Postmodern Cynicism and the Construction of a Virtuous Reality (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2009); Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Susanne K. K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957); Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner, 1953); Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Media and Formal Cause (Houston, TX: NeoPoiesis Press, 2011); Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967); An Ong Reader, ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002); C. Kaha Waite, Mediation and the Communication Matrix (New York: Peter Lang, 2003).
15 Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); The Muse Learns to Write (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).
16 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 144 original emphasis.
17 Ibid., 248.
18 Christine Nystrom, “Towards a Science of Media Ecology: The Formulation of Integrated Conceptual Paradigms for the Study of Human Communication Systems” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1973).
19 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 9.
20 Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203.
21 Arendt, The Human Condition, 9.
22 Ibid., 8–9.
23 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).
24 Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Bantam, 1979).
25 Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 38.
26 Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1944), 4.
27 Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1971).
28 See Anton, Sources of Significance.
29 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 37–39.
30 Paglia, Sexual Personae, 10–11.
31 Ibid., 30.
32 Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked.
33 Ibid.
34 Marshall McLuhan, Essential McLuhan, ed. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (New York: Basic, 1995); Lewis Mumford, The Transformations of Man (New York: Harper & Bros., 1956); Langer, Philosophy in a New Key.
35 Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics (Ithaca, NY: Columbia University Press, 1952), 17.
36 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: I. Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), 5.
37 R. Buckminster Fuller with E. J. Applewhite, Synergetics (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 17.
38 Ibid., 85.
39 Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 56–57.
40 McLuhan, Understanding Media.
41 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life and Society and Solitude (London: Macmillan, 1883), 14.
42 Ibid., 385.
43 Ibid., 388.
44 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964).
45 Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961), 34.
46 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934); Myth of the Machine: I.; The Myth of the Machine: II. The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970).
47 Ellul, The Technological Society; Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).
48 Arendt, The Human Condition.
49 Mumford, The Condition of Man, 5.
50 George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934).
51 Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1955).
52 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (New York: Ballantine, 1972); Mind and Nature.
53 Mumford, The Condition of Man, 7–8.
54 Ibid., 8.
55 Mumford, The Transformations of Man, 2.
56 Mumford, The Condition of Man, 7–8.
57 Ibid., 9–10.
58 Arendt, The Human Condition.
59 James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
60 Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970).
61 Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity, 2nd ed. (Lakeville, CT: International Non-Aristotelian Library/Institute of General Semantics, 1950); Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 5th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: International Non-Aristotelian Library/Institute of General Semantics, 1993).
62 Arendt, The Human Condition, 8–9.
63 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
64 Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity.
65 Korzybski, Science and Sanity.