Media ecological orientations to philosophy and philosophical problems

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the Media Ecology special issue of the Review of Communication provides a broad overview of the history of media ecology, clarifies its main orientations and key thinkers, and then illustrates how problems and orientations within philosophy are symptoms of various kinds of technological mediation.

KEYWORDS:

• Philosophy
• media ecology
• communication theory
• communication studies

Form follows function and function follows form, in a rhythmic interplay between necessity and freedom, between construction and choice, between the object-determined self and the self-determined object.¹

I am referring here not to the potentialities of the individual mind but to the predispositions of a cultural mind-set.²

Introduction

This special issue of The Review of Communication seeks to demonstrate the relevance of media ecology to philosophical problems, philosophical orientations, and philosophy, as well as communication studies more generally. The idea for this collection first germinated during a panel presented at the 2015 National Communication Association annual convention. I am grateful to the sponsors, the Philosophy of Communication Division and the Media Ecology Association, and to those who attended the session—this special issue attempts to address the many questions that were raised there. The task is to illustrate how various problems and orientations within philosophy are fundamentally symptoms of particular kinds of technological mediation. Philosophy as a whole, as these essays seek to show, has much to gain from engaging media ecological thought. Rather than summarize the different articles included in this special issue, I allow them to stand on their own and speak for themselves. This introduction, instead, overviews key orientations within media ecology and illustrates a few of the ways that media ecology relates to philosophy and communication studies.

Understanding media ecology

The particular expression “media ecology” grew out of a 1967 discussion among Marshall McLuhan, Eric McLuhan, and Neil Postman. By 1968, Postman was using the term in public talks, and he established a doctoral program by that name at New York University (NYU) in 1971. In 1998, NYU, The Toronto schools of media studies, and St. Louis University joined up to form the Media Ecology Association (MEA).³

Media ecology refers to the multidisciplinary study of both environments as media and media as environments.⁴ Not only do different environments and social places set the stage for likely and/or appropriate interaction,⁵ but also, less obviously, communication technologies become environments in their own right.⁶ Each medium, mode, or code of communication carries various kinds of biases, preferences for space, time, pace, and/or duration.⁷ Each is an extension of the body that feeds and nourishes—welcomes and grooms—particular senses of self and particular configurations of social relations. Communication technologies, from languages to smart phones, begin their existence as antienvironmental controls—“figures” by which people try to gain some command over parts of their environment. In time, as any technology comes to dominance, it merges with the encompassing environment, becoming an invisible ground in its own right.⁸ Consider a few examples.

People dwell in the taken-for-granted—often hardly noticed—semantic environments that their languages afford.⁹ Notice the difference between hearing your native tongue and hearing an unknown language. In both cases, speech sounds appear within the immediate environment, but our mother tongue somehow opens internally beyond the sounds and carries us along within its meaning. It is how items remote in space and time can be articulately, concernfully engaged.¹⁰ Words, as words, are space–time modulators—portals opening beyond themselves; they generate their own bearings of space and time, enabling people to transcend the “here-and-now.” Through the integration of memory, imagination, and language, people can plan for distant events or ruminate about people and places from long ago.¹¹ They can speculate, just as they can give vows and celebrate anniversaries. There is, then, a profound sense in which “to speak,” at all, is “to philosophize.” With little other than articulated breath, people traverse over all things, flying on the invisible fabric of language. Words are magic, pure and simple; they allow speakers to pull rabbits and hats out of thin air. Undeniably, word choice is the “little difference that makes a difference.”¹² Not only do events take their frame from talk, but also, different languages have different biases, different orientations, and different value sensibilities imbedded in them. Humans always already find themselves in situations that were partly created with language and continue to be oriented by language.

The same general environmental principles can be witnessed in the clock. Few technologies have more thoroughly revolutionized self and society. In many regards, the clock symbolizes technology itself, as all subsequent technologies seem geared into the kinds of precision that clocks make possible. Lewis Mumford writes, “space and time, like language itself, are works of art, and like language they help condition and direct practical action.”¹³ The clock was not merely a more accurate way of measuring the passage of time. It fundamentally affected the tempo of life, the meaning of work, the orchestration of social action, and the sense of reality. Of the clock, Mumford writes, “by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science.”¹⁴ People could conceive, for example, the speed of sound or the speed of light only after having been released from seasonal and diurnal rhythms—only after having desacralized and objectified time.

Consider too, the book, the first mass-produced item.¹⁵ A book is not merely an object within one’s hands. Bringing forms of literacy, learning, and hermeneutic sociality, books undergird and inform the environment in which literates find themselves. Contemporary sensibilities regarding mathematics, geography, democracy, legal practice, banking, or even basic education would be impossible without the standardizing properties of print-based media. As a perceptual disclosure of the world’s geography is never part of direct unmediated experience, who can imagine having a firm grasp on world geography independent of exposure to (and study of) maps? Without standardized text, without articulate discourse objectively sitting still before us, we are at a loss for public detribalized consciousness. Books are needed if everyone is to be “on the same page.” And, with everyone capable of getting on the same page, books brought widespread silent reading and robust opportunities for self-education. On the other hand, print literacy ushered in the mind/body split and entrenched subjectivist thought. It also brought about new relations of abstract power. Few inventions have more significantly changed people’s sense of self and community—and informed their education and politics—than the printed word. Countless thought patterns and life practices depend upon the space–time character it affords (education, legal and political processes, etc.). One final way to illustrate how the printed word has become an environment is to appreciate that no one can be illiterate in a wholly oral culture. The ground “cause” of illiteracy is nothing other than literacy itself.

Once a medium or technology comes to dominance, it matters little whether any particular individual uses it. This is implied by the claim that a medium becomes an environment. Consider an example quite different than those given above: the birth control pill.¹⁶ It was an invention designed to control certain biological processes, but, in due time, it generated a new environment: the companionate marriage, older first-time parents, more females in college, a more competitive co-ed workplace, the two-car garage, fewer children and smaller families, different power dynamics in families, etc.

As a final illustration, take the example of smart phones: they began as antienvironmental controls and soon enough have become invisible environments, ones which structure—invite as well as subvert—various paths of action and interaction. A smart phone is more than something in one’s pocket. We are “in” the space and time that the phone makes possible. Someone on a phone, whether talking or texting, has extended a part of themselves beyond the confines offered by the unmediated body—and the effects are both individual and social. Many smart phone applications (apps) such as AirBnB, Uber, and Etsy are disrupting traditional economics and social practices.¹⁷ These apps are not merely doing what they do within the already existing environment. On the contrary, they can do what they do only by changing the environmental conditions.

Any communicative medium offers its own “where-character” and “when-character,” both of which afford various senses of “who” and “why.” The sense of self and community (and the direction of intention and motive) are some function of the spaces and times in which people find themselves,¹⁸ and, the ranges of space and time are opened, dilated, and oriented through various communication technologies. Moreover, at this point in history, technologies are increasingly hybrids or “remediated,”¹⁹ meaning subsequent media both engulf and transfigure earlier forms. For example, radio changed after television (e.g., it was pushed more into background uses and took up news distribution burdens),²⁰ just as television has changed considerably since the rise of social media (e.g., the emergence of “reality TV”), and it is continuing to change, too, in the wake of Photoshop and computer-generated graphics (e.g., television is becoming even more “mythic,” and “fake news” is easier to produce and distribute). Text and reading are not going away, but their roles and functions are being altered rapidly; for growing numbers of readers, anything longer than a tweet (140 characters) will soon seem unnecessarily wordy. Microchips and circuit boards—smart technologies—are being integrated into more and more things of the world (e.g., refrigerators, automobiles, home thermostats). Remediation today means that one no longer buys a new car; one buys a computer on wheels.

Media ecology and philosophy

Media ecology is not a branch of philosophy. It admittedly draws upon philosophy, but it also draws upon anthropology, archeology, economics, education, history, literature, poetry, psychology, sociology, systems theory, etc. It is best approached as a metadisciplinary field of study. Somewhat aligned with a “big history” orientation or a macrotheory systems-approach, media ecology explores countless developments in Western history, revealing the critical roles played by communication technologies. Additionally, media ecology is sometimes less interested with philosophical arguments than with practical concerns such as strategic urban development, the design of public places, the construction of educational spaces and platforms, forms of media activism and journalism, etc.

Much of media ecology attends to changes in the body’s sensory balance (and/or changes in pace, ranges of associations, or power relations) introduced by any dominant media form. And much media ecology addresses the history and evolution of cultures and persons. Accordingly, media ecologists often rely upon methodologies that are less philosophical and more historical and/or anthropological (and sometimes akin to science fiction). Some proceed by employing what Walter J. Ong terms “diachronic phenomenology.”²¹ Whereas contemporary analytic philosophers commonly philosophize through counterfactual conditionals and seek justified true beliefs, media ecologists tend to explore and probe through overstatement and/or analogy, and they look for recurrent patterns. Media ecological thought recognizes that, in times of information overload, pattern recognition becomes a key strategy for survival. It might be helpful to emphasize the difference between “philosophy proper” and “philosophical thought” and then to draw a parallel connection between “media ecology proper” and “media ecological thought.”

Obviously, not all philosophical thought occurs within philosophy proper. By philosophy proper, I mean philosophy done by people who have degrees in philosophy, who are employed by universities in philosophy departments, and who publish philosophical books or publish within philosophy journals. Although this definition sounds narrow, the field is not. There are many branches of philosophy: analytic philosophy, ancient philosophy, Asian philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, continental philosophy, existential philosophy, feminist philosophy, logic, medieval philosophy, philosophy of communication, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, philosophy of technology, and many more. Granting wide latitude, there is still much philosophical thought that falls outside the bounds of philosophy proper.

Some philosophical thought occurs within everyday life, often entertained by people who have read few, if any, philosophy books. Everyday folks, bearing their subjectivity and realizing how it may differ from others present, may contextualize what they wish to convey by stating, “Well, in my philosophy … ” Consumer products, hotel chains, and airline companies have their philosophies printed in promotional literature. Barflies can sit in pubs and wax philosophical about anything they like. Some of this occurs without anyone explicitly thinking of the discussion as philosophical. The rough content of such general philosophical thought includes speculation, reflective wonder, sets of arguments, abstract claims, and espousals of beliefs and/or values.

Within the Western tradition, philosophical thought is often set in contrast to scientific thought. Science employs empirical—often mathematically based—methodologies to deliver either certainty or knowledge, whereas philosophy traffics in possibilities and probabilities (rational, logical, and/or evaluational). In various regards, at least historically, philosophy paved the way for numerous scientific fields. Many of today’s scientific areas of study were, initially, merely domains of philosophical thought. Atomic theory and cosmology (and even mathematics), for example, began as forms of philosophical speculation, but were subsumed into the larger context of scientific thought and became independent fields in their own right.

Some finer distinctions between philosophical thought and media ecological thought might be drawn out by considering the following: A popular philosophical question during the mid-nineteenth century was whether or not a galloping horse ever had all four of its legs in the air at the same time. Eadweard Muybridge was hired to settle a bet by scientifically documenting the answer to the question through photography. As philosophical thought is at home with such speculative questions, and as scientific thought attempts to answer such questions rigorously, media ecological thought is more interested in how, in this case, photography solidified a certain notion of truth as well as bolstered our sense of the possibilities of “capturing” it. Hence, asking about the nature of reality at either the macro- or microscale are perennial philosophical questions: Where did all this stuff come from? What is the universe (including myself) made of? How do I know what I should do? etc. The telescope and microscope provided countless scientific answers and yet spawned more philosophical questions: Is there a definite age to the cosmos? Can robots become conscious? Should a given biotechnology be employed? To this sociohistorical dance of questions and responses between philosophy and science—whereby philosophical speculation and rational wonders calls forth scientific practices and technologies attempting to test and furnish evidence—we find media ecology interested in the dialectic itself, attending to side-effects of media, the inculcation of new biases and the growth of orientations in their sense of scale, patterns of associations, and communicative appetites. Media ecology offers probes and tries to identify recurrent patterns that could be followed up on by more specialized scientific disciplines, or even for further philosophical consideration. But, because it often draws so heavily upon historical, anthropological, economic, educational, and literary sources, media ecology falls well beyond the bounds of philosophy proper.

Similar to the distinction between “philosophy proper” and “philosophical thought,” we can draw a distinction between someone who is well versed in media ecological literature and is a self-identified “media ecologist” and someone who, in the past or present, has provided a media ecological insight or position. The former, we might say, does “media ecology proper,” while the latter has had a “media ecological thought.” Those who do media ecology proper come in different stripes. Some are graduates from the media ecology program at NYU. Some studied with McLuhan at Toronto, or with Ong at St. Louis. Many are members of the MEA, an organization that has active representation at the annual conventions of the National Communication Association, the International Communication Association, and the Eastern States Communication Association. In addition to their own annual international convention, the MEA has a quarterly journal: Explorations in Media Ecology.

In addition to media ecology proper, there is a more general spirit of media ecology, what could be called “media ecological thought” or “media ecological insight.” Many people entertained media ecological thought even though they predated the term media ecology. Plato, as one obvious example, was being media ecological when, in the Phaedrus, he commented that writing rolls about defenseless, will make people forgetful, and will hinder their understanding of wisdom. Iconoclasts are media ecological when they forbid the making of images. Mumford’s Technics and Civilization, first published in 1934 (predating McLuhan’s Understanding Media by three decades), provides a rich foundation for media ecological thought.

Many contemporary scholars, some who have attended MEA conventions, write with media ecological sensibilities. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, for example, documents how the operations of thought, in their proclivities and appetites, are neurologically grounded.²² We also can find thinkers such as Andy Clark, in Supersizing the Mind,²³ and Stanislas Dehaene, in Numbers in the Brain,²⁴ powerfully revealing the kinds of hybrid thought that become possible as material symbols merge with biological capacities. Sherry Turkle, in Alone Together, well documents the “fearful symmetry” of humans becoming more robotic as robots become more human. She shows how technologies such as Facebook bring new kinds of intimacy, new forms of vulnerabilities, and new forms of dependencies.²⁵

One final notable commonality between media ecology proper and philosophy proper is the focus on key thinkers. One way that media ecology stands out within the communication studies field and aligns with philosophy proper is that media ecology is book-driven rather than article-driven (admittedly, contemporary analytic philosophy can be rather article driven). Media ecology also tends to focus upon key thinkers and authors rather than topics of research. Key thinkers in media ecology are Marshall McLuhan, Walter J. Ong, and Neil Postman. Some significant others include: Eric Havelock, Edmund Carpenter, Lewis Mumford, Harold Innis, Jacques Ellul, Edward Hall, Jack Goody, Dorothy Lee, Gregory Bateson, John Culkin, Louis Forsdale, Christine Nystrom, James Carey, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Erving Goffman, Susanne Langer, John Dewey, Benjamin Whorf, Edward Sapir, Milman Parry, Paul Watzlawick, Jeremy Rifkin, René Girard, Friedrich Kittler, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and Alfred Korzybski. Several issues of Explorations in Media Ecology have been devoted to exploring the boundaries of media ecology and identifying media ecological thinkers and insights from outside well-known media ecological sources.²⁶

Philosophy is impossible without particular media forms, as Postman makes clear:

While I do not know exactly what content was once carried in the smoke signals of American Indians, I can safely guess that it did not include philosophical arguments  … . You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content  … . You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against its content.²⁷

In a word, the medium in which people philosophize is part of the activity itself. The orientations, methods, and goals of philosophy may be cloaked—if not deeply misunderstood—if they are not placed within the broader context of media ecological thought. Without appreciating the crucial roles played by media forms (alphabetic literacy, money, calendars, clocks, movable print, mirrors, etc.), we can see some trees—a little bit of the forest—but the whole of the forest, including its nutritive ground, remains out of view. Sustaining and enriching (or simply salvaging) philosophic culture may require some awareness of the structure and function (the form), of the media in which it most robustly occurs.²⁸

Philosophic culture, media ecology, and today’s situation

Many profound and far-reaching transformations are happening in the U.S.A. and abroad. What is at stake is nothing less than the refiguring of basic patterns of human interactions, the quickening of life’s rhythms and pace, and the disruption of earlier senses of self, family, community, education, employment, and politics. The Internet, smart phones, social networking sites, artificial intelligence, robotics, modern pharmacological science, biotechnology, and automation have all played some role in the changes afoot. Such technologies, like all of the technologies that have come before them and made them possible, have not simply “added” themselves to the world. Like King Midas, they have transformed everything they have touched, us included.²⁹

Philosophic culture in the West was inaugurated by Socrates’s style of questioning, memorialized in writing by Plato’s dialogues, significantly developed by the analytic treatises of Aristotle, and eventually brought to its fullest expression after the period of print (its apex spanning from René Descartes to Jean-Paul Sartre, or perhaps culminating in the U.S.A. with Mortimer Adler and Robert M. Hutchins’s Great Books of the Western World ³⁰). It may now, beginning mainly with television, be descending from the heights of extreme textual abstraction, to approach what will be its nadir: philosophical thought dragged into (and grown out of) the increasingly incoherent morass available on the Internet.

Philosophy is a love of the reasonable word, a love of the wise word, and a love of articulate judgment, spoken and/or written. But the Internet’s social networking systems threaten to erode these sensibilities on many fronts: images increasingly crowd out the articulate word. People are becoming more impatient by the hour. They over-rely on quantification for judgments of quality, and U.S. culture, general speaking, is collapsing from a lack of shared context and mutual relevance.³¹ Today, as more and more people grow up “ill-literate” through prolonged exposure to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, Kik, Tinder, etc., we see how much the rational sense of self—how much the life of articulate expression and historical consciousness—remains indebted to alphabetic literacy and the printed word.

Books provide a kind of intimate otherness that can be rivaled only by radio (or perhaps phone). But books, in contrast to auditory media, have the developmental advantage of making the reader animate the voice of the other. In learning to read books, readers must give voice to the texts in order to hear what authors have to say, and, thereby, their own voices thicken as sociohistorical choruses. People come to tolerate the rarified heights of philosophic discourse only after great amounts of textual training and only by learning to interact with the past as a mode of dwelling in the present. The medium of the printed book teaches people to imagine ideas shared across time in lieu of communicating with others in shared space. Books help people become more tolerant of abstract thought’s many ambiguities and also more comfortable with conceptualization detethered from the immediate world of perception. Books create a world of autonomous discourse, one where each book is subject to new interpretations as it is brought to new readers and contexts.³² Moreover, printed books do not use perceptual realism to simulate life, nor do they create para-social relations.³³

Without question, alphabetic literacy was unsettling and divisive to tribal/oral life, but it was book culture that created its own forms of stability over hundreds of years, culminating in democratic notions of free individuals—liberated by equality before the law—who could create publics capable of self-governance and self-legislation. Today, new social networking media are significantly disrupting cultural traditions and practices, tearing asunder what took centuries of print literacy to accomplish. Even if philosophic culture, due to many forms of “lay literacy,”³⁴ is not going away wholesale, philosophy is on the decline and is salvageable only through recognizing the value of the printed word. Much new media threatens to undermine some of the basic resources for philosophic culture, partly because they are more image-based than text-based (and one cannot argue with an image per se), but, more importantly, because they are expanding upon and completing television’s practice of placing people within the context of no-context.³⁵

Images are presentational, not propositional; an image presents, suggests, reminds, alludes, hints, and associates, but it cannot make a specific, one-and-only-one claim. We have no rational defenses against such timeless, dreamlike associations. We can demand more clarity or ask for evidence regarding what someone asserts about an image, but an image “all-on-its-own” underspecifies and overflows the highly delimited meaning achievable through spoken or written language.³⁶ For example, try to imagine a photograph or even a silent film that means nothing more and nothing less than the meaning of the previous sentence.

People today also enjoy popularity won by being popular; they feel legitimated by the sheer numbers of likes, shares, reposts, and followers they get, even though no one needs to explain why they “like” (or “dislike”) anything. What does “liking” even mean in the Internet age? Does it mean that people agree? Do they think something is funny or interesting or reasonable? Perhaps they want others to reciprocate and “like” what they post? Generally speaking, people have become less interested in the veracity of claims and/or the kinds of evidence provided.

Oversimplifying the issue, we might say that books (or the biases of book culture and widespread alphabetic literacy) promote a mode of articulated meditation, one characterized by a social solitude, one whereby unknown depths of self are germinated, cultivated, and eventually bloom into sociohistorical sensibilities. As disrupting as books are to oral/tribal life, they provide a context for abstract historical intersubjectivity. Also, because books require readers to give life to them, they allow readers to select them according to relevance and proceed at their own pace. In contrast, the Internet (especially “social networking” technology) promotes a kind of chronic distraction of updates (often as commercials or “self-branding”). This distraction is characterized by solitary sociality, whereby self and others constantly seek attention and ask each other to be who they need to be so that all can be who they want to be, preferably in an instant and without any inconvenience.³⁷ Additionally, because social networking technology “goes on” with or without particular individuals, it naturally generates in people the feeling of needing to “keep up” and/or the experience of FOMO (fear of missing out).

Quiet and desperate, hypnotized and distractedly drifting along, many young people spectate life through screens. They flit about from information bit to information bit, multi-tasking from text-message to wiggly-gif to cat video to porn to someone’s latest post about a recent meal. As a by-product, they are becoming more and more ill-equipped to comprehend extended verbal abstractions (spoken or written), and they increasingly seem unable to read or understand the wealth of philosophy available in libraries and on the Internet. Worse still, many people today have come to imagine themselves as potentially irrelevant in their own lives. They have become onlookers, anonymous voyeurs in an electronic world that gives them live-time access to a world that goes on without them. They can hear and see but cannot do much else. Life’s aspirations, in that context, have been reduced to a climate-controlled environment, a comfy chair, a tasty snack, and a good line-up of video entertainment, perhaps some binge-watching. Moreover, people have absorbed thousands of hours of condensed drama, emotionally undergoing many lifetimes of vicarious obstacles, triumphs, and tragedies, but all of it without real commitment or sacrifice. Many people today have symbolically consumed more “life” than they will ever live, and such experiences make everyday “real” life feel slow, diluted, uneventful, boring,³⁸ and even fake.

There is even the threat that “being knowledgeable” and/or being “philosophically inquisitive” has become obsolete as more and more people exclusively seek applicable, practical, technical information. Technocratic instrumentalist orientations to information and knowledge are ever on the rise. That is to say, “learning for learning's sake,” itself a reversal from the orientations of nomadic hunter/gatherer societies, is now reversing once again, this time into: “I’ll look it up if and when I need to know it.” Socrates is well known for saying that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Perhaps less well known is Alphonso Lingis’s reply: “the unlived life is not worth examining.” Many people in the U.S.A., unfortunately, may soon fall short on both accounts.

Media ecological orientations to philosophical issues

A host of “philosophical issues” can be indentified as symptoms, outgrowths, or products of the kinds of societies and selves formed through various modes of technological mediation. For example, Ong shows how the visualist logic of Ramism emerged out of late writing and early print. He accounts for the epistemological shift from dialogue and debate to the quiet space of visual arrangement.³⁹ Ong also notes how personalist philosophies were made possible by the interiorizing depths of literacy.⁴⁰ It would not, by those lights, be much of a stretch to suggest that thought about what it means to be a person (including class awareness, gender equality, racial equality, etc.), are caught in forms of mediation (money, books, mirrors, photographs, computer-generated images, etc.).⁴¹ A great deal of political philosophy comes from the modes of detribalization ushered in by money and literacy, and countless forms of epistemological problems—problems within mathematics and logic—are obvious outgrowths of print literacy.⁴² And, elsewhere, I have explored at length how the concepts of ethics, morals, and laws respectively resonate with developments in speech, writing, and print.⁴³

Scholars up to the task would likely find it easy to show how money and books inform notions of utilitarianism. Mirrors and photographs bear upon self-awareness, false beliefs, and theories of mind. Audio recordings and virtual holograms relate to beliefs in the afterlife. The automobile bears upon notions of privacy and social inequality (e.g. it “makes the pedestrian a second-class citizen”⁴⁴). Artificial intelligence profoundly influences notions of morality, consciousness, and selfhood. People’s concepts of truth and their understandings of objectivity are increasingly shaped by modern imaging technologies. They seem to be moving in two opposing directions: on one hand, the latest digital imaging technologies allow for strategic manipulations and presentations of physical impossibilities (e.g. “virtual reality,” “false facts” and “fake-news”); on the other hand, instant replay renders multiangled representations that are now inseparable from popular notions of objectivity (e.g. televised sports events). Moreover, medical imaging technology significantly shapes people’s sense of when life begins.

Notions of reality itself, that is, “Reality with a capital R,” resonate with dominant communication technologies. For wholly oral peoples, reality shows itself in terms of the logos, the spoken word. It appears as spirited (haunted) and animated by unseen presences and invisible sources of agency. With phonetic writing, reality takes on a different order; it becomes increasingly visible. Taking the visible for their ground, literates can look for sequential connections, events happening one-thing-at-a-time. As the clock gained ascendency in Western culture, reality seemed more similar to a machine, one that operated with synchronized clock-like precision. Soon thereafter, with the rise of print-based literacy, reality increasingly appeared to be a book that could be studied, deciphered, and ultimately comprehended. In the modern digital age, reality is taken by some to be a kind of super information-processing system, or, perhaps, it is assumed to be a computer simulation.

Communication technologies not only groom scientific assumptions about the nature of reality, but also correlatively impact people’s senses of possibilities regarding the divine. One initial trajectory to notice in the history of the Western world, at least in broad outlines, is the movement from early forms of animism to varieties of polytheism to monotheism, deism, and, eventually pantheism, atheism, and panpsychism. These movements roughly correspond to the growth and development of certain kinds of personhood. The coagulation of inwardness, the development of ego, its crystallization within increasingly detribalized peoples, the solidification of the sense of a private, self-governing individual—all of these run concurrent with various religious traditions and register the growth and dominance of widespread literate sensibilities. If speech roughly aligns with animism and polytheism, then the beginnings of monotheism in the West grow out of phonetic and alphabetic forms of writing, backed by money. The alphabet was the condition for universal translation, and, as such, it resonated with monotheism. The book enabled early Christian proselytizing. But both the book and the clock eventually lent intelligibility to the ideas of deism.⁴⁵ Atheism and scientific naturalism seem to be one of the possible outcomes of the wholly detribalized individual. Many people today are engulfed in the world built by money and literacy, a world that has enabled and demanded a technological society designed for pervasive and fully functional individual anonymity.⁴⁶ Today, as book literacy wanes while technologies of science advance, one could predict more polytheistic, pantheistic, and panpsychic theologies on the horizon. Recent initiatives promoting “interfaith dialogue” suggest a growing recognition of the need for an umbrella large enough to make room for many different senses of the divine.

Finally, a few words should be said about the phrase “technological determinism,” a term employed when people want to challenge media ecological orientations. The claim is that media ecology invites an undermining of human agency, and some people even experience moral outrage at the notion that their agency could be compromised by technology. This perspective is reflected most boldly in the expression, “Guns don’t kill people, people do.”⁴⁷ Those who employ such expressions assume that human agency predates and excludes any and all technology, and/or they wish to place agency within people and people alone. The thinking here is problematic and misguided on at least three fronts.

First, the notion of causality studied within media ecology is more aligned to concepts found within systems-theory than laboratory-based scientific research. It is not similar to that found in studying a ball hitting another ball upon a billiard table.⁴⁸ It is more akin to the study of possible relations given by the particular form of the table, balls, and pockets. It also includes the study of the social, psychological, and economic relations that grow out of communities that have billiard tables as a staple in their lives.

Second, modes of agency are issued, enabled, and/or compromised by various communication technologies. What would agency be like without language, literacy, clocks, calendars, and schedules? Imagine parents in today’s world trying to keep their children’s agency pure and uncompromised by keeping them illiterate. Is the ability to use an alarm clock a limitation upon one’s agency or is it one of the ways that the agency we now experience has become possible? Technologies, especially dominant ones—meaning largely invisible ones—are woven into the range and scope of human agency. Technologies neither have agency in and of themselves, nor do they exist independent of human agency. Any actual agency that people do experience (or come to take for granted) is always already tangled up in countless communication technologies (e.g. language, money, literacy, calendars, roads, maps, clocks, computers). This also means that other communication technologies (e.g. forms of surveillance, drones, modes of incarceration, chemical mediation) can significantly undermine modes of agency. All said, agency cannot be grasped ahistorically or acontextually.

Third, if media ecologists discuss causality, it is likely they are talking about “formal cause.”⁴⁹ Aristotle designated four causes for things that exist: material, efficient, final, and formal. Consider a knife. Material cause refers to the substance—metal, wood, or plastic—from which the knife must be composed. Efficient cause refers to the physical processes—the actual sequence of events—that produce the knife. It must be carved, whittled, smithed, forged, or perhaps injection-molded. Final cause refers to the purpose—or ends—the knife is designed to serve. Formal cause refers to what makes the knife recognizable as the kind of object it is—a sharp cutting blade. It refers to the form in view that had to have been there for the producer to know when the shaping of it (efficient cause) was complete. Formal cause, therefore, aligns to the scholastic notion of “quiddity” or “whatness”; it is the cause that makes things what they are.

Modern scientists, in their inquiries into the natural world, have abandoned Aristotlean notions of final and formal cause and have attempted to reduce the world to material or efficient causes. Contemporary media ecology would recommend otherwise. Formal causality not only seems relevant to some kinds of emergence within the physical sciences, but also helps to provide a framework for predicting possible “side effects” emerging from dominant communication technologies. The orientations, proclivities, sensibilities, and appetites nurtured by a given medium inevitably seek to apply (and feed) themselves elsewhere.

The more general point regarding formal cause, then, is that a given medium or environment whets appetites that, in time, seek to satisfy themselves in other domains. The uniformity, linearity, and seriality of alphabetic text encouraged people to “look along the same lines” in everything they did. Print soon enough led to white collared shirts with uniformly sized and spaced buttons. It led to square houses built on plots of land that are squared to right angles and whose owners mow their lawns to 1½ inches and who edge grass along the sidewalk to the exact ends of their property lines. Such people know what a lawn is. This is literacy as formal cause.

If the book teaches patience and standardization, today’s smart phones are growing appetites for relationships of convenience and life at the touch of a button. As people scroll through news feeds and can add or delete friends with one keystroke, what will friendship be in a few decades? What will study or education be? More and more people seem to want life to be user-friendly, remote-control accessible, and, perhaps, voice-activated. We can only guess that as voice recognition technologies improve and as more people own such technologies, many will soon expect their peers to be similarly indulgent and obedient. In next to no time, many people will prefer the company of robots.

Kenneth Burke’s notion of perfection nicely complements McLuhan’s work on formal causality. Burke uses the expression “rotten with perfection” to highlight the human tendency to follow out the implications of terms, to pursue things to the end of the line, to carry out the entelechy implied by a terminology, a scene, or a technology. People need to open their senses and attend carefully to the kinds of appetites that particular technologies whet. Given how quickly technologies and the culture are changing, people must learn to appraise new technologies in terms of their trajectories, asking again and again: what, exactly, will people become if they follow these out to the end of the line?

I am hopeful this introduction, indeed, this special issue, demonstrates it is not too late for philosophic culture. If philosophy can be salvaged from the ravages of technological change, then it will be by young scholars (and university programs, intellectual enclaves, book clubs, etc.) tenaciously holding on to print-based literacy. They will learn to read, re-read, study, and discuss; they will take the time to engage in social solitude with great minds long since past. They will need to ask their friends, family members, mentors, or professors for suggested readings—a preliminary list, by no means exhaustive, follows below—and then talk with each other about what they have read. Their revolution must help create the monastic microclimates that nourish the life of the mind of all around them.

Selected further reading

Anton, Corey. “On the Roots of Media Ecology: A Micro-History and Philosophical Clarification.” Philosophies 1, no. 2 (2016): 126–32.

Carey, James W. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989.

Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Reformations in Early Modern Europe. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Translated by John Wilkinson, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.

Gencarelli, Thomas F. “The Intellectual Roots of Media Ecology in the Thought and Work of Neil Postman.” The New Jersey Journal of Communication 8, no. 1 (2000): 91–103.

Goody, Jack. The Interface Between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Grosswiler, Paul. “Cussing the Buzz-Saw, or, the Medium Is the Morality of Peter-Paul Verbeek.” Explorations in Media Ecology 15, no. 2 (2016): 129–39.

Hall, Edward T. Beyond Culture. New York: Anchor, 1976.

Havelock, Eric A. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963.

Heim, Michael. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1987.

Herder, Johann Gottfried. “Essay on the Origin of Language.” In On the Origin of Language, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder. Translated by John H. Moran and Alexander Code, 85–166. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

Irwin, Stacy O. “Media Ecology and the Internet of Things.” Explorations in Media Ecology 15, no.2 (2016): 159–71.

Jenkins, Eric S. Special Affects: Cinema, Animation, and the Translation of Consumer Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

Logan, Robert K. “McLuhan’s Philosophy of Communication: An Introduction.” Philosophies 1, no. 2 (2016): 133–40.

Lum, Casey Man Kong. Perspectives on Culture, Technology, and Communication: The Media Ecology Tradition. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2005.

Lunceford, Brett. “Posthuman Visions: Creating the Technologized Body.” Explorations in Media Ecology 11, no. 1 (2012): 7–25.

MacDougall, Robert C. “Mapping the Mind: A Techno-Philosophical Probe.” Explorations in Media Ecology 15, no. 2 (2016): 173–201.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Paradox Press, 1993.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric McLuhan. Media and Formal Cause. Houston, TX: NeoPoiesis Press, 2011.

Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Olson, David. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Ong, Walter J. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977.

Ralón, Laureano. “The Media Ecology–Philosophy of Technology Disconnect: A Matter of Perception?” Explorations in Media Ecology 15, no. 2 (2016): 113–28.

Rifkin, Jeremy. Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History. New York: Henry Holt, 1987.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Psychology of Imagination. Translated by Bernard Frechtman, New York: Citadel Press, 1991.

Sternberg, Janet. Misbehavior in Cyber Places: The Regulation of Online Conduct in Virtual Communities on the Internet. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2012.

Strate, Lance. Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition. New York: Peter Lang, 2017.

Van Den Edee, Yoni. “Blindness and Ambivalence: The Meeting of Media Ecology and Philosophy of Technology.” Explorations in Media Ecology 15, no. 2 (2016): 103–12.

Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: Harper, 2007.

Zhang, Peter. “Media Ecology and Techno-Ethics in Paul Virilo.” Explorations in Media Ecology 12, no. 3–4 (2013): 241–57.

Acknowledgements

I especially need to thank Ramsey Eric Ramsey for his kind invitation to guest edit this special issue. He, and his competent associate editor, Sohinee Roy, helped immensely on many fronts. They kept everything flowing smoothly throughout what could have been a painful process, and I am grateful. Finally, I need to thank Valerie V. Peterson for her support and for her extensive assistance in the final stages.

Notes

1 Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics (Ithaca, NY: Columbia University Press, 1952), 128.

2 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking, 1985), 51.

3 Media Ecology Association http://www.media-ecology.org.

4 Lance Strate, “A Media Ecology Review,” Communication Research Trends 23, no. 2 (2005): 1–48; Corey Anton, “History, Orientations, and Future Directions of Media Ecology,” in Communication Uncovered: General Semantics and Media Ecology (Fort Worth, TX: Institute of General Semantics, 2011), 77–91.

5 Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966); Beyond Culture (New York: Anchor, 1976); The Silent Language (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959); Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York: Basic, 1971); Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

6 Neil Postman, Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk (New York: Delacorte, 1976); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964); Counterblast (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969); Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (Corte Madera, CA: Ginko Press, 1967).

7 Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951); Changing Concepts of Time (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952); Empire and Communications, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972).

8 McLuhan, Understanding Media; McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage.

9 See Postman’s discussion of “Semantic Environments,” in Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk, 3–20.

10 Corey Anton, “Discourse as Care: A Phenomenological Consideration of Spatiality and Temporality,” Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences 25, no. 2 (2002): 185–205.

11 Corey Anton, Sources of Significance: Worldly Rejuvenation and Neo-Stoic Heroism (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2010).

12 Gregory Bateson defines information as differences that make a difference. See Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Bantam, 1979).

13 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934), 18.

14 Ibid., 15.

15 McLuhan, Understanding Media.

16 See Valerie V. Peterson, “Birth Control: An Extension of ‘Man,’” Explorations in Media Ecology 9, no. 1 (2010): 1–20; “Sex–Drug Technologies: A Media Ecological Approach to Birth Control and ED Drugs,” in Drugs and Media: New Perspectives on Communication, Consumption, and Consciousness, ed. Robert C. MacDougall (New York: Continuum, 2011), 83–96.

17 Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity (New York: Portfolio, 2016).

18 Kenneth Burke often underscores that motives are shorthand for situations. See Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 29–36.

19 See McLuhan, Understanding Media; Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

20 See McLuhan, Understanding Media.

21 Corey Anton, “Presence and Interiority: Walter Ong’s Contributions to a Diachronic Phenomenology of Voice,” in Of Ong and Media Ecology: Essays in Communication, Composition, and Literary Studies, ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2012), 71–90; “Diachronic Phenomenology: A Methodological Thread within Media Ecology,” Explorations in Media Ecology 13, no. 1 (2014): 9–36.

22 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2011).

23 Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

24 Stanislas Dehaene, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

25 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic, 2012).

26 See the double special issue of Explorations in Media Ecology 14 no. 1 & 2.

27 Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 7.

28 McLuhan suggests that baseball is well suited for radio and football is well suited for television, to which we can add that philosophy is best suited for print. See Understanding Media.

29 See McLuhan, Understanding Media.

30 Mortimer Adler and Robert M. Hutchins, Great Books of the Western World, 54 vols. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952).

31 See Lance Strate, Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World Revisited (New York: Peter Lang, 2014).

32 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Methuen, 1982).

33 Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl, “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance,” Psychiatry 19, no. 3 (1956): 215–29.

34 Ivan Illich, “A Plea for Research on Lay Literacy,” in Literacy and Orality, ed. David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 28–46.

35 See George W. S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997).

36 See William H. Gass, Habitations of the Word: Essays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).

37 See Carr, The Shallows; Turkle, Alone Together.

38 See Orrin E. Klapp, Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the Information Society (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986).

39 Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).

40 Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970).

41 See Edmund Carpenter, Oh What A Blow that Phantom Gave Me! (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973).

42 See McLuhan, Understanding Media, 157–58.

43 Corey Anton, ed., “Ethicality, Morality, and Legality: Alignments of Speech, Writing, and Print Respectively,” in Valuation and Media Ecology: Ethics, Morals, and Laws (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2010), 1–34.

44 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 297.

45 See Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 52.

46 See Anton, Sources of Significance.

47 See McLuhan, Understanding Media; Lance Strate, “Studying the Media as Media: McLuhan and the Media Ecology Tradition,” Media Tropes eJournal 1 (2008): 127–42.

48 Strate, “Studying the Media as Media.”

49 Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Media and Formal Cause (Houston, TX: NeoPoiesis Press, 2011); Corey Anton, “McLuhan, Formal Cause, and the Future of Technological Mediation,” The Review of Communication 12, no. 4 (2012): 276–89; Corey Anton, Robert K. Logan, and Lance Strate, eds., Taking Up McLuhan’s Cause: Perspectives on Media and Formal Causaliy (Chicago: Intellect /University of Chicago Press, 2017).