Cultural studies and media ecology: Meyrowitz's medium theory and Carey's cultural studies

Abstract

The recent proliferation of scholarship outlining the intellectual roots of media ecology represents a welcome break from past scholarship that dismissed studies of forms of communication as mere technological determinism. In this essay, the work of two prominent communication and media studies scholars, Joshua Meyrowitz and James Carey, is examined in order to demonstrate how their studies represent media ecology with rigorous and insightful analyses of the dynamic interaction between communication, consciousness, and culture. Perhaps more importantly, this essay highlights how the works of these two media ecologists fit into and embody a North American cultural studies approach to media studies. The intent of this essay is to push the understanding of the intellectual roots of media ecology toward a broader analysis of how media ecology is embedded in, and advocates for, the larger move in communication studies away from narrow, quantitative effects research and towards qualitative and interdisciplinary scholarship that is North American cultural studies.

Notes

Donna P. Flayhan (Ph. D., University of Iowa) is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland 21204 ([email protected]). Thanks are given for the Goucher College Faculty Affairs Committee Summer Research Grant which allowed the review of Harold Innis's research notes and letters at the University of Toronto Archives in 1996. Flayhan currently conducts research in the areas of media ecology, cultural studies, disability studies, and communication public health studies and was awarded the “Harold Adams Innis Award for Outstanding Thesis or Dissertation in the Field of Media Ecology” by the Media Ecology Association in June, 2000. She would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive and specific comments on this essay.