Media ecology theory is the study of media, technology, and communication and how they affect human environments. The theoretical concepts were proposed by Marshall McLuhan in 1964, while the term media ecology was first formally introduced by Neil Postman in 1968.
140-577: Ecology in this context refers to the environment in which the medium is used – what they are and how they affect society. Neil Postman states, "if in biology a 'medium' is something in which a bacterial culture grows (as in a Petri dish), in media ecology, the medium is 'a technology within which a [human] culture grows.'" In other words, "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
280-662: A Bachelor of Arts degree from Rockhurst College , where he majored in Latin. During his time at Rockhurst College, he founded a chapter of the Catholic fraternity Alpha Delta Gamma . He worked in printing and publishing prior to entering the Society of Jesus in 1935, and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1946. In 1940 Ong earned a master's degree in English at Saint Louis University . His thesis on sprung rhythm in
420-401: A center of gravity, a moral compass to media ecology which was later adapted and formally introduced by Neil Postman The very foundation for this theory is based on a metaphor that provides a model for understanding the new territory, offers a vocabulary, and indicates in which directions to continue exploring. As Carlos Scolari states, "the configuration of media ecology in the 1960s and 1970s
560-401: A collection of individual components". Logan argues that general systems theory, as well as cybernetics, complexity theory, and emergent dynamics, and media ecology "cross pollinate each other" in that, "a general system is a medium" due to the non-linear aspects of messages and that general systems are "quasi-deterministic". This thinking is in line with McLuhan who once wrote, "A new medium
700-410: A continuum between full orality and full literacy, Ong distinguishes between primary oral cultures (which have never known writing), cultures with craft literacy (such as scribes), and cultures in a transition phase from orality to literacy, in which some people know of writing but are illiterate - these cultures have "residual orality". Some of Ong's interests: According to Adrian Johns ' foreword to
840-406: A detached view allows the individual to observe the phenomenon of the whole as it operates within the environment. The effects of media - speech, writing, printing, photograph, radio or television – should be studied within the social and cultural spheres impacted by this technology. McLuhan argues that all media, regardless of content, acts on the senses and reshapes sensory balance, further reshaping
980-465: A dramatic effect on community structure. Hunting of sea otters, for example, is thought to have led indirectly to the extinction of the Steller's sea cow ( Hydrodamalis gigas ). While the keystone species concept has been used extensively as a conservation tool, it has been criticized for being poorly defined from an operational stance. It is difficult to experimentally determine what species may hold
1120-428: A dramatic impact on the ecology of individual species or whole ecosystems. For instance, the replacement of an ant species by another (invasive) ant species has been shown to affect how elephants reduce tree cover and thus the predation of lions on zebras . A trophic level (from Greek troph , τροφή, trophē, meaning "food" or "feeding") is "a group of organisms acquiring a considerable majority of its energy from
1260-412: A flattened body relative to the main populations that live in open savanna. The population that lives in an isolated rock outcrop hides in crevasses where its flattened body offers a selective advantage. Habitat shifts also occur in the developmental life history of amphibians, and in insects that transition from aquatic to terrestrial habitats. Biotope and habitat are sometimes used interchangeably, but
1400-451: A given context and if the effects were often subliminal, the same might be true of other human artifacts, the wheel, the printing press, the telegraph and the TV". This led to the emergence of his ideas on media ecology. In addition to his scholarly work, McLuhan was also a well known media personality of his day. He appeared on television shows, in magazine articles, and even had a small cameo in
1540-612: A higher one." Small scale patterns do not necessarily explain large scale phenomena, otherwise captured in the expression (coined by Aristotle) 'the sum is greater than the parts'. "Complexity in ecology is of at least six distinct types: spatial, temporal, structural, process, behavioral, and geometric." From these principles, ecologists have identified emergent and self-organizing phenomena that operate at different environmental scales of influence, ranging from molecular to planetary, and these require different explanations at each integrative level . Ecological complexity relates to
SECTION 10
#17327869954491680-444: A keystone role in each ecosystem. Furthermore, food web theory suggests that keystone species may not be common, so it is unclear how generally the keystone species model can be applied. Complexity is understood as a large computational effort needed to piece together numerous interacting parts exceeding the iterative memory capacity of the human mind. Global patterns of biological diversity are complex. This biocomplexity stems from
1820-408: A keystone species can result in a community collapse just as the removal of the keystone in an arch can result in the arch's loss of stability. Sea otters ( Enhydra lutris ) are commonly cited as an example of a keystone species because they limit the density of sea urchins that feed on kelp . If sea otters are removed from the system, the urchins graze until the kelp beds disappear, and this has
1960-741: A legacy niche that was constructed before their time. Biomes are larger units of organization that categorize regions of the Earth's ecosystems, mainly according to the structure and composition of vegetation. There are different methods to define the continental boundaries of biomes dominated by different functional types of vegetative communities that are limited in distribution by climate, precipitation, weather, and other environmental variables. Biomes include tropical rainforest , temperate broadleaf and mixed forest , temperate deciduous forest , taiga , tundra , hot desert , and polar desert . Other researchers have recently categorized other biomes, such as
2100-439: A linear successional route, changes might occur quickly or slowly over thousands of years before specific forest successional stages are brought about by biological processes. An ecosystem's area can vary greatly, from tiny to vast. A single tree is of little consequence to the classification of a forest ecosystem, but is critically relevant to organisms living in and on it. Several generations of an aphid population can exist over
2240-439: A macroscopic view of the system. While the notion of trophic levels provides insight into energy flow and top-down control within food webs, it is troubled by the prevalence of omnivory in real ecosystems. This has led some ecologists to "reiterate that the notion that species clearly aggregate into discrete, homogeneous trophic levels is fiction." Nonetheless, recent studies have shown that real trophic levels do exist, but "above
2380-508: A master's degree in English who was once a student of McLuhan at the Saint Louis University. The contributions of Ong standardized and gave credibility to the field of media ecology as worthy of academic scholarship. Ong explored the changes in human thought and consciousness in the transition from a dominant oral culture to a literate one in his book Orality and Literacy . Ong's studies have greatly contributed to developing
2520-408: A media is introduced it is adapted to human senses so that it becomes an extension of the individual, and its capabilities influence the whole of society, leading to change. McLuhan states that there are three inventions that transformed the world: the phonetic alphabet , by virtue of its ability to make speech visible, which McLuhan argues gave rise to the discipline of rhetoric in ancient time and to
2660-516: A mix of herbivores and predators). Omnivores do not fit neatly into a functional category because they eat both plant and animal tissues. It has been suggested that omnivores have a greater functional influence as predators because compared to herbivores, they are relatively inefficient at grazing. Trophic levels are part of the holistic or complex systems view of ecosystems. Each trophic level contains unrelated species that are grouped together because they share common ecological functions, giving
2800-420: A new appreciation for the influence that organisms have on the ecosystem and evolutionary process. The term "niche construction" is more often used in reference to the under-appreciated feedback mechanisms of natural selection imparting forces on the abiotic niche. An example of natural selection through ecosystem engineering occurs in the nests of social insects , including ants, bees, wasps, and termites. There
2940-491: A part of us. Different mediums emphasize different senses and encourage different habits, so engaging in this medium day after day conditions our senses. Different forms of media also affect what their meaning and impact will be. The form of medium and mode of information determines who will have access, how much information will be distributed, how fast it will be transmitted, how far it will go, and, most importantly, what form it will be displayed. With society being formed around
SECTION 20
#17327869954493080-435: A population-level phenomenon, as with the migration routes followed by plants as they occupied northern post-glacial environments. Plant ecologists use pollen records that accumulate and stratify in wetlands to reconstruct the timing of plant migration and dispersal relative to historic and contemporary climates. These migration routes involved an expansion of the range as plant populations expanded from one area to another. There
3220-401: A region), and sites are classed either as sources or sinks. A site is a generic term that refers to places where ecologists sample populations, such as ponds or defined sampling areas in a forest. Source patches are productive sites that generate a seasonal supply of juveniles that migrate to other patch locations. Sink patches are unproductive sites that only receive migrants; the population at
3360-517: A seasonal influx of new immigrants. A dynamic metapopulation structure evolves from year to year, where some patches are sinks in dry years and are sources when conditions are more favorable. Ecologists use a mixture of computer models and field studies to explain metapopulation structure. Community ecology examines how interactions among species and their environment affect the abundance, distribution and diversity of species within communities. Johnson & Stinchcomb (2007) Community ecology
3500-456: A species describes the environment over which a species is known to occur and the type of community that is formed as a result. More specifically, "habitats can be defined as regions in environmental space that are composed of multiple dimensions, each representing a biotic or abiotic environmental variable; that is, any component or characteristic of the environment related directly (e.g. forage biomass and quality) or indirectly (e.g. elevation) to
3640-402: A specific habitat, such as a cave or a pond, and principles gleaned from small-scale studies are extrapolated to larger systems. Feeding relations require extensive investigations, e.g. into the gut contents of organisms, which can be difficult to decipher, or stable isotopes can be used to trace the flow of nutrient diets and energy through a food web. Despite these limitations, food webs remain
3780-494: A system of infrastructure that connect the nature and culture of a society with media ecology being the study of "traffic" between the two. In 1934, Marshall McLuhan enrolled as a student at Cambridge University , a school which pioneered modern literary criticism . During his studies at Cambridge, he became acquainted with one of his professors, I.A. Richards , a distinguished English professor, who would inspire McLuhan's later scholarly works. McLuhan admired Richards' approach to
3920-456: A technology that must be laboriously learned, and which effects the first transformation of human thought from the world of sound to the world of sight. This transition has implications for structuralism , deconstruction , speech-act and reader-response theory, the teaching of reading and writing skills to males and females, social studies , biblical studies , philosophy , and cultural history generally. This 600-page selection of Ong's works
4060-446: A valuable tool in understanding community ecosystems. Food webs illustrate important principles of ecology : some species have many weak feeding links (e.g., omnivores ) while some are more specialized with fewer stronger feeding links (e.g., primary predators ). Such linkages explain how ecological communities remain stable over time and eventually can illustrate a "complete" web of life. The disruption of food webs may have
4200-476: A whole functional system, such as an ecosystem , cannot be predicted or understood by a simple summation of the parts. "New properties emerge because the components interact, not because the basic nature of the components is changed." Walter J. Ong Walter Jackson Ong SJ (November 30, 1912 – August 12, 2003) was an American Jesuit priest , professor of English literature , cultural and religious historian , and philosopher . His major interest
4340-399: A wide array of interacting levels of organization spanning micro-level (e.g., cells ) to a planetary scale (e.g., biosphere ) phenomena . Ecosystems, for example, contain abiotic resources and interacting life forms (i.e., individual organisms that aggregate into populations which aggregate into distinct ecological communities). Because ecosystems are dynamic and do not necessarily follow
Media ecology - Misplaced Pages Continue
4480-485: Is a central concept in the ecology of organisms and is sub-divided into the fundamental and the realized niche. The fundamental niche is the set of environmental conditions under which a species is able to persist. The realized niche is the set of environmental plus ecological conditions under which a species persists. The Hutchinsonian niche is defined more technically as a " Euclidean hyperspace whose dimensions are defined as environmental variables and whose size
4620-504: Is a function of the number of values that the environmental values may assume for which an organism has positive fitness ." Biogeographical patterns and range distributions are explained or predicted through knowledge of a species' traits and niche requirements. Species have functional traits that are uniquely adapted to the ecological niche. A trait is a measurable property, phenotype , or characteristic of an organism that may influence its survival. Genes play an important role in
4760-414: Is a larger taxonomy of movement, such as commuting, foraging, territorial behavior, stasis, and ranging. Dispersal is usually distinguished from migration because it involves the one-way permanent movement of individuals from their birth population into another population. In metapopulation terminology, migrating individuals are classed as emigrants (when they leave a region) or immigrants (when they enter
4900-533: Is a notable work that contributes to the field known today as book history. Therein, Ong briefly describes more than 750 volumes (mostly in Latin) that he had tracked down in more than 100 libraries in Europe. Peter Ramus (1515–1572), was a French humanist, logician, and educational reformer whose textbook method of analyzing subjects was very widely adopted in many academic fields. In "Ramist Classroom Procedure and
5040-442: Is a technology like other technologies (fire, the steam engine, etc.) that, when introduced to a "primary oral culture" (which has never known writing) has extremely wide-ranging impacts in all areas of life. These include culture, economics, politics, art, and more. Furthermore, even a small amount of education in writing transforms people's mentality from the holistic immersion of orality to interiorization and individuation. Many of
5180-461: Is an emergent homeostasis or homeorhesis in the structure of the nest that regulates, maintains and defends the physiology of the entire colony. Termite mounds, for example, maintain a constant internal temperature through the design of air-conditioning chimneys. The structure of the nests themselves is subject to the forces of natural selection. Moreover, a nest can survive over successive generations, so that progeny inherit both genetic material and
5320-422: Is an environment produced both by technological change and human imagination of this globalized environment." Additionally, the rise in media communication technology has uniformed the way individuals across the globe process information. Plugh says, "Where literate societies exchange an 'eye for an ear,' according to McLuhan, emphasizing the linear and sequential order of the world, electronic technology retrievers
5460-548: Is an expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University . It is a pioneering work in cultural studies and media ecology . He writes, "[my] works do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explains everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, [my] thesis is relationist: major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness, are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to
5600-404: Is another statistical approach that is often used in conservation research . Metapopulation models simplify the landscape into patches of varying levels of quality, and metapopulations are linked by the migratory behaviours of organisms. Animal migration is set apart from other kinds of movement because it involves the seasonal departure and return of individuals from a habitat. Migration is also
5740-438: Is greater than respiration) by photosynthesis or chemosynthesis . Heterotrophs are organisms that must feed on others for nourishment and energy (respiration exceeds production). Heterotrophs can be further sub-divided into different functional groups, including primary consumers (strict herbivores), secondary consumers ( carnivorous predators that feed exclusively on herbivores), and tertiary consumers (predators that feed on
Media ecology - Misplaced Pages Continue
5880-492: Is itself responsible for the changes that our socio-cultural world is undergoing and will undergo, McLuhan necessarily denies that a critical attitude is morally significant or practically important." Ecology Ecology (from Ancient Greek οἶκος ( oîkos ) 'house' and -λογία ( -logía ) 'study of') is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms and their environment . Ecology considers organisms at
6020-530: Is media that demands active involvement from the audience, requiring the audience to be active and provide information by mentally participating. This is multi-sensory participation. Some examples of cool media are TV, seminars, and cartoons. "McLuhan frequently referred to a chart that hung in his seminar room at the University of Toronto. This was a type of shorthand for understanding the differences between hot and cool media, characterized by their emphasis on
6160-408: Is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them." Marshall McLuhan used the phrase global village to characterize an end to isolation: "humans can no longer live in isolation, but rather will always be connected by continuous and instantaneous electronic media ". McLuhan addresses
6300-445: Is no specific order to the laws of media, as the effects occur simultaneously and form a feedback loop: technology impacts society, which then impacts the development of technology. The four effects, as depicted in the tetrad of media effects are: A significant criticism of this theory is a result of its deterministic approach. Determinism insists that all of society is a result of or effected by one central condition. In some cases
6440-481: Is organized on the themes of orality and rhetoric. It includes his 1967 encyclopedia article on the "Written Transmission of Literature" (331–44); his most frequently cited article, his 1975 PMLA article "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction" (405–27); and his most frequently reprinted article, his 1978 ADE Bulletin article "Literacy and Orality in Our Times" (465–78). Taken together, these three essays make up
6580-609: Is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Toronto and Chief Scientist of the Strategic Innovation Lab at the Ontario College of Art and Design . He worked collaboratively with Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto, co-publishing various works and producing his own works, heavily inspired by McLuhan. Logan updates the era of communications, adding two new eras: In addition, through
6720-590: Is the Park Grass Experiment , which was initiated in 1856. Another example is the Hubbard Brook study , which has been in operation since 1960. Holism remains a critical part of the theoretical foundation in contemporary ecological studies. Holism addresses the biological organization of life that self-organizes into layers of emergent whole systems that function according to non-reducible properties. This means that higher-order patterns of
6860-538: Is the "arts" or curriculum subjects which hold the world together. Nothing is accessible for "use," that is, for active intussusception (the assimilation of new material and its dispersal among preexistent matter) by the human being, until it has first been put through the curriculum. The schoolroom is by implication the doorway to reality, and indeed the only doorway." The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (1967)
7000-543: Is the Print Age, when individual media products were mass-produced due to the invention of the printing press. It gave the ability to reproduce the same text over and over again. With printing came a new visual stress: the portable book, which allowed people to carry media so they could read in privacy isolated from others. Libraries were created to hold these books and also gave freedom to be alienated from others and from their immediate surroundings. Lastly, McLuhan describes
7140-413: Is the biosphere: the total sum of ecosystems on the planet. Ecological relationships regulate the flux of energy, nutrients, and climate all the way up to the planetary scale. For example, the dynamic history of the planetary atmosphere's CO 2 and O 2 composition has been affected by the biogenic flux of gases coming from respiration and photosynthesis, with levels fluctuating over time in relation to
SECTION 50
#17327869954497280-403: Is the message", the technological bias of a medium carries greater importance than the particular message it is delivering. McLuhan saw changes in the dominant medium of communication as the main determinant of major changes in society, culture, and the individual. This McLuhanesque logic, which rests at the center of the media ecology tradition, is often criticized for its media determinism. Seeing
7420-522: Is the study of the interactions among a collection of species that inhabit the same geographic area. Community ecologists study the determinants of patterns and processes for two or more interacting species. Research in community ecology might measure species diversity in grasslands in relation to soil fertility. It might also include the analysis of predator-prey dynamics, competition among similar plant species, or mutualistic interactions between crabs and corals. These ecosystems, as we may call them, are of
7560-556: Is used for managing wildlife stocks and setting harvest quotas. In cases where basic models are insufficient, ecologists may adopt different kinds of statistical methods, such as the Akaike information criterion , or use models that can become mathematically complex as "several competing hypotheses are simultaneously confronted with the data." The concept of metapopulations was defined in 1969 as "a population of populations which go extinct locally and recolonize". Metapopulation ecology
7700-405: The abundance or biomass at each level. When the relative abundance or biomass of each species is sorted into its respective trophic level, they naturally sort into a 'pyramid of numbers'. Species are broadly categorized as autotrophs (or primary producers ), heterotrophs (or consumers ), and Detritivores (or decomposers ). Autotrophs are organisms that produce their own food (production
7840-436: The logistic equation by Pierre Verhulst : where N(t) is the number of individuals measured as biomass density as a function of time, t , r is the maximum per-capita rate of change commonly known as the intrinsic rate of growth, and α {\displaystyle \alpha } is the crowding coefficient, which represents the reduction in population growth rate per individual added. The formula states that
7980-551: The message is separate from a medium. McLuhan saw the message and the medium to mean the same thing. The audience is normally focused on the content and overlooks the medium. What we forget is that the content cannot exist outside of the way that it is mediated. McLuhan recognized that the way media work as environments is because we are so immersed in them. "It is the medium that has the greatest impact in human affairs, not specific messages we send or receive." The media shape us because we partake in them over and over until they become
8120-449: The "yin" tradition is studying environments as media, emphasizing interpersonal communication. While general systems theory originated in 1928 in the Ph.D. thesis of Ludwig von Bertalanffy . Robert Logan summarizes a general system as "one that is composed of interacting and interrelated components such as an understanding of it must entail considering the general system as a whole and not as
8260-564: The 2004 edition, Ong was urged to research Ramus after his graduate mentor, Marshall McLuhan had no particular interest in Ong's original subject, Gerard Manley Hopkins. McLuhan vigorously encouraged Ong's work, and eventually drew upon his former student's perspective on Ramism to write his own pivotal work, The Gutenberg Galaxy . Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to
8400-560: The Art of Reason (1958) elaborates the contrast between the visual and the oral that Ong found in Louis Lavelle's La parole et l'ecriture (1942). Ong details how the spatialization and quantification of thought in dialectic and logic during the Middle Ages enabled "a new state of mind" to emerge in print culture , which is associated with the emergence of modern science. The companion volume, Ramus and Talon Inventory (1958)
8540-690: The Board of Foreign Scholarships. In 1967 he served as president of the Milton Society of America. In 1978 he served as elected president of the Modern Language Association of America . He was very active on the lecture circuit as well as in professional organizations. Ong died in 2003 in St. Louis, Missouri . A major concern of Ong's works is the impact that the shift from orality to literacy has had on culture and education. Writing
SECTION 60
#17327869954498680-551: The Earth and atmospheric conditions within a narrow self-regulating range of tolerance. Population ecology studies the dynamics of species populations and how these populations interact with the wider environment. A population consists of individuals of the same species that live, interact, and migrate through the same niche and habitat. A primary law of population ecology is the Malthusian growth model which states, "a population will grow (or decline) exponentially as long as
8820-568: The Electronic Age, otherwise included under the information age , as an era of instant communication and a return to an environment with simultaneous sounds and touch. It started with a device created by Samuel Morse's invention of the telegraph and led to the telephone, the cell phone, television, internet, DVD, video games, etc. This ability to communicate instantly returns people to the tradition of sound and touch rather than sight. McLuhan argues that being able to be in constant contact with
8960-777: The European version of media ecology (as practiced by authors such as Matthew Fuller and Jussi Parikka ) presents a post-structuralist political perspective on media as complex dynamical systems. Along with McLuhan ( McLuhan 1962 ), Postman ( Postman 1985 ) and Harold Innis , media ecology draws from many authors, including the work of Walter Ong , Lewis Mumford , Jacques Ellul , Félix Guattari , Eric Havelock , Susanne Langer , Erving Goffman , Edward T. Hall , George Herbert Mead , Margaret Mead , Claude Lévi-Strauss , Benjamin Lee Whorf , and Gregory Bateson . These three assumptions can be understood as: media are everywhere all
9100-498: The Message ", two of his most well-known phrases that encapsulate the theory of media ecology. McLuhan used the approaches of Richards, William Empson , and Harold Innis as an "entrée to the study of media". However, it took many years of work before he was able to successfully fulfill their approaches. McLuhan determined that "if words were ambiguous and best studied not in terms of their 'content' but in terms of their effects in
9240-541: The Nature of Reality", Ong discusses Ramism as a transition phase between the Classical style of education and the modern one. He writes, "...Ramism might seem merely quaint, perhaps artistically lethal, but of no great importance. Yet its great spread will hardly allow us to regard it as educationally insignificant. As a matter of fact, it has educational significance of the headiest sort, for it implies no less than that it
9380-591: The Word (1982), he attempts to identify the distinguishing characteristics of orality by examining thought and its verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy (especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population. Ong drew heavily on the work of Eric A. Havelock , who suggested a fundamental shift in the form of thought coinciding with the transition from orality to literacy in Ancient Greece . Ong describes writing as
9520-445: The answer is very simple. What does it feel like? That's all we have experienced. We're all astronauts on a little spaceship called earth." Critics do worry though, that in creating a truly global village, some cultures will become extinct due to larger or more dominant cultures imposing their beliefs and practices. The idea of the global village helps to conceptualize globalization within society. Michael Plugh writes, "[The] village
9660-561: The banner of "media ecology". Scholar Janet Sternberg has a different take on the metaphor- using her own metaphor to make sense of it all. Sternberg applies the Chinese "yin/ yang" metaphor to media ecology as a means of better understanding the divergence among scholars. She states that there are two basic intellectual traditions that can be distinguished in the field: the "yang" tradition of studying media as environments, focusing on mass communication and on intrapersonal communication and
9800-423: The biases of media technologies as the primary force for social and cultural change resembles the hard technological determinism of the embodied theory of technological bias. The critics of such a deterministic approach could be theorists who practice other forms of determinism, such as economic determinism. Theorists such as John Fekete believes that McLuhan is oversimplifying the world "by denying that human action
9940-594: The challenges in politics, philosophy and education. He is a founder of the vibrant school of ecology of culture. The European version of media ecology rejects the North American notion that ecology means environment. Ecology in this context is used "because it is one of the most expressive [terms] language currently has to indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter". Following theorists such as Felix Guattari , Gregory Bateson , and Manuel De Landa ,
10080-409: The computer, and television are not therefore simply machines which convey information. They are metaphors through which we conceptualize reality in one way or another. They will classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, argue a case for what it is like. Through these media metaphors, we do not see the world as it is. We see it as our coding systems are. Such is the power of
10220-727: The concept of media ecology. Ong has written over 450 publications, many of which focused on the relation between conscious behavior and the evolution of the media, and he received the Media Ecology Association's Walter Benjamin Award for Outstanding Article for his paper, "Digitization Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of Writing and Today's Computers". Media ecology is a contested term within media studies for it has different meanings in European and North American contexts. The North American definition refers to an interdisciplinary field of media theory and media design involving
10360-399: The condition can be language ( linguistic determinism ), religion ( theological determinism ), financial ( economic determinism ). In the case of McLuhan, Postman and Media Ecology, technology is the sole determinant for society and by breaking up time in measures of man's technological achievements they can be classified as technological determinism . According to Postman, "The printing press,
10500-408: The critical view that English studies are themselves nothing but a study of the process of communication. Richards believed that "words won't stay put and almost all verbal constructions are highly ambiguous". This element of Richards' perspective on communication influenced the way in which McLuhan expressed many of his ideas using metaphors and phrases such as " The Global Village " and " The Medium Is
10640-714: The diversity of life from genes to ecosystems and spans every level of biological organization. The term has several interpretations, and there are many ways to index, measure, characterize, and represent its complex organization. Biodiversity includes species diversity , ecosystem diversity , and genetic diversity and scientists are interested in the way that this diversity affects the complex ecological processes operating at and among these respective levels. Biodiversity plays an important role in ecosystem services which by definition maintain and improve human quality of life. Conservation priorities and management techniques require different approaches and considerations to address
10780-455: The dominant medium of the day, the specific medium of communication makes a remarkable difference. The key elements to media ecology have been largely attributed to Marshall McLuhan, who coined the statement "the medium is the message". Levinson furthers McLuhan's statement by stating that "the way we communicate, often taken for granted, often determines what we communicate, and therein just about everything else in life and society". McLuhan gave
10920-530: The dynamic resilience of ecosystems that transition to multiple shifting steady-states directed by random fluctuations of history. Long-term ecological studies provide important track records to better understand the complexity and resilience of ecosystems over longer temporal and broader spatial scales. These studies are managed by the International Long Term Ecological Network (LTER). The longest experiment in existence
11060-456: The ecology and evolution of plants and animals. Ecological theory has also been used to explain self-emergent regulatory phenomena at the planetary scale: for example, the Gaia hypothesis is an example of holism applied in ecological theory. The Gaia hypothesis states that there is an emergent feedback loop generated by the metabolism of living organisms that maintains the core temperature of
11200-529: The effects of the introduction of the technology of writing are related to the fact that oral cultures require strategies of preserving information in the absence of writing. These include, for example, a reliance on proverbs or condensed wisdom for making decisions, epic poetry, and stylized culture heroes (wise Nestor, crafty Odysseus). Writing makes these features no longer necessary, and introduces new strategies of remembering cultural material, which itself now changes. Because cultures at any given time vary along
11340-434: The energy is transferred through a chain of organisms by consumption. The simplified linear feeding pathways that move from a basal trophic species to a top consumer is called the food chain . Food chains in an ecological community create a complex food web. Food webs are a type of concept map that is used to illustrate and study pathways of energy and material flows. Empirical measurements are generally restricted to
11480-460: The environment experienced by all individuals in the population remains constant." Simplified population models usually starts with four variables: death, birth, immigration , and emigration . An example of an introductory population model describes a closed population, such as on an island, where immigration and emigration does not take place. Hypotheses are evaluated with reference to a null hypothesis which states that random processes create
11620-418: The equilibrium between human sensual organs and affect human psychology and society. The extension of human senses will change our thoughts and behaviors and the ways we perceive the world. That's why McLuhan believed when a new medium appears, no matter what the concrete content it transmits, the new form of communication brings in itself a force that causes social transformation. We are accustomed to thinking
11760-451: The equilibrium, r / α {\displaystyle r/\alpha } as K , which is known as the "carrying capacity." Population ecology builds upon these introductory models to further understand demographic processes in real study populations. Commonly used types of data include life history , fecundity , and survivorship, and these are analyzed using mathematical techniques such as matrix algebra . The information
11900-586: The evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state. But the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish". Ong subsequently developed his observations regarding polemic in The Presence of the Word (192–286) in his book length study Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University . In Ong's most widely known work, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of
12040-471: The eye or the ear." Another aspect of media ecology is the laws of media, which McLuhan outlined with his son Eric McLuhan to further explain the influence of technology on society. The laws of media theory are depicted by a tetrad, which poses questions about various media, with the goal of developing peoples' critical thinking skills and to prepare people for "the social and physical chaos" that accompany every technological advancement or development. There
12180-589: The flux of energy and matter through an environment. Ecosystems have biophysical feedback mechanisms that moderate processes acting on living ( biotic ) and abiotic components of the planet. Ecosystems sustain life-supporting functions and provide ecosystem services like biomass production (food, fuel, fiber, and medicine), the regulation of climate , global biogeochemical cycles , water filtration , soil formation , erosion control, flood protection, and many other natural features of scientific, historical, economic, or intrinsic value. The scope of ecology contains
12320-480: The form of information." Postman has also stated that "a medium is a technology within which a culture grows; that is to say, it gives form to a culture's politics, social organization, and habitual ways of thinking". Scholars such as Michael Zimmer view McLuhan and his "Medium is the Message" theory as a prime example of technological determinism: ...an overarching thread in media ecological scholarship, exemplified by McLuhan's (1964/1994) assertion that "the medium
12460-400: The former applies to a community's environment, whereas the latter applies to a species' environment. Definitions of the niche date back to 1917, but G. Evelyn Hutchinson made conceptual advances in 1957 by introducing a widely adopted definition: "the set of biotic and abiotic conditions in which a species is able to persist and maintain stable population sizes." The ecological niche
12600-544: The former relates only to the physical modifications of the habitat whereas the latter also considers the evolutionary implications of physical changes to the environment and the feedback this causes on the process of natural selection. Ecosystem engineers are defined as: "organisms that directly or indirectly modulate the availability of resources to other species, by causing physical state changes in biotic or abiotic materials. In so doing they modify, maintain and create habitats." The ecosystem engineering concept has stimulated
12740-518: The full ecological scope of biodiversity. Natural capital that supports populations is critical for maintaining ecosystem services and species migration (e.g., riverine fish runs and avian insect control) has been implicated as one mechanism by which those service losses are experienced. An understanding of biodiversity has practical applications for species and ecosystem-level conservation planners as they make management recommendations to consulting firms, governments, and industry. The habitat of
12880-408: The herbivore trophic level, food webs are better characterized as a tangled web of omnivores." A keystone species is a species that is connected to a disproportionately large number of other species in the food-web . Keystone species have lower levels of biomass in the trophic pyramid relative to the importance of their role. The many connections that a keystone species holds means that it maintains
13020-406: The human and oceanic microbiomes . To a microbe , the human body is a habitat and a landscape. Microbiomes were discovered largely through advances in molecular genetics , which have revealed a hidden richness of microbial diversity on the planet. The oceanic microbiome plays a significant role in the ecological biogeochemistry of the planet's oceans. The largest scale of ecological organization
13160-479: The idea of a global village in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy saying, "Such is the character of a village or, since electric media, such is also the character of global village. And it is the advertising and PR community that is most aware of this basic new dimension of global interdependence". Technology, especially electronic media in today's age, makes the world increasingly interconnected. Socially, economically, politically, culturally, what happens in one part of
13300-404: The idea of teaching the narrative of 'Spaceship Earth' where students are taught the importance of everyone taking care of planet earth as a fragile system of diversity both biological and cultural; however, the original person to coin the term 'Spaceship Earth' was futurist Buckminster Fuller , who once said, "I've often heard people say: 'I wonder what it would feel like to board a spaceship,' and
13440-1078: The individual, population , community , ecosystem , and biosphere levels. Ecology overlaps with the closely related sciences of biogeography , evolutionary biology , genetics , ethology , and natural history . Ecology is a branch of biology , and is the study of abundance , biomass , and distribution of organisms in the context of the environment. It encompasses life processes, interactions, and adaptations ; movement of materials and energy through living communities; successional development of ecosystems; cooperation, competition, and predation within and between species ; and patterns of biodiversity and its effect on ecosystem processes. Ecology has practical applications in conservation biology , wetland management, natural resource management ( agroecology , agriculture , forestry , agroforestry , fisheries , mining , tourism ), urban planning ( urban ecology ), community health , economics , basic and applied science , and human social interaction ( human ecology ). The word ecology ( German : Ökologie )
13580-399: The information content, McLuhan highlighted the importance of medium characteristics which can influence and even decide the content. He proposed that it is the media format that affects and changes on people and society. For example, traditional media is an extension of the human body, while the new media is the extension of the human nervous system. The emergence of new media will change
13720-404: The interplay among ecological processes that operate and influence patterns at different scales that grade into each other, such as transitional areas or ecotones spanning landscapes. Complexity stems from the interplay among levels of biological organization as energy, and matter is integrated into larger units that superimpose onto the smaller parts. "What were wholes on one level become parts on
13860-412: The interplay of development and environmental expression of traits. Resident species evolve traits that are fitted to the selection pressures of their local environment. This tends to afford them a competitive advantage and discourages similarly adapted species from having an overlapping geographic range. The competitive exclusion principle states that two species cannot coexist indefinitely by living off
14000-402: The latter focuses on materials and energy fluxes. System behaviors must first be arrayed into different levels of the organization. Behaviors corresponding to higher levels occur at slow rates. Conversely, lower organizational levels exhibit rapid rates. For example, individual tree leaves respond rapidly to momentary changes in light intensity, CO 2 concentration, and the like. The growth of
14140-424: The lifespan of a single leaf. Each of those aphids, in turn, supports diverse bacterial communities. The nature of connections in ecological communities cannot be explained by knowing the details of each species in isolation, because the emergent pattern is neither revealed nor predicted until the ecosystem is studied as an integrated whole. Some ecological principles, however, do exhibit collective properties where
14280-432: The lower adjacent level (according to ecological pyramids ) nearer the abiotic source." Links in food webs primarily connect feeding relations or trophism among species. Biodiversity within ecosystems can be organized into trophic pyramids, in which the vertical dimension represents feeding relations that become further removed from the base of the food chain up toward top predators, and the horizontal dimension represents
14420-429: The medium is the message ", which is an often-debated phrase believed to mean that the medium chosen to relay a message is just as important (if not more so) than the message itself. McLuhan proposed that media influence the progression of society, and that significant periods of time and growth can be categorized by the rise of a specific technology during that period. Additionally, scholars have compared media broadly to
14560-626: The most prolific and understandable ideas to come out of media ecology, and has spurred significant research in many areas. It is especially relevant in today's society, where the internet, social media, and other new media have made the world a smaller place, and today many researchers give McLuhan credit for his foresight. Of note is McLuhan's insistence that the world becoming a global village should lead to more global responsibility. Technology has created an interconnected world, and with that should come concern for global events and occurrences outside one's own community. Postman builds on this concept with
14700-558: The most various kinds and sizes. They form one category of the multitudinous physical systems of the universe, which range from the universe as a whole down to the atom. Tansley (1935) Ecosystems may be habitats within biomes that form an integrated whole and a dynamically responsive system having both physical and biological complexes. Ecosystem ecology is the science of determining the fluxes of materials (e.g. carbon, phosphorus) between different pools (e.g., tree biomass, soil organic material). Ecosystem ecologists attempt to determine
14840-533: The movie Annie Hall . Few theories receive the kind of household recognition that media ecology received, due directly to McLuhan's role as a pop culture icon. He was an excellent debater and public speaker, but his writing was not always what would normally pass in academia. Inspired by McLuhan, Neil Postman founded the Program in Media Ecology at New York University in 1971, as he further developed
14980-456: The nature of the unique physical environments that shapes the biodiversity within each. A more recent addition to ecosystem ecology are technoecosystems , which are affected by or primarily the result of human activity. A food web is the archetypal ecological network . Plants capture solar energy and use it to synthesize simple sugars during photosynthesis . As plants grow, they accumulate nutrients and are eaten by grazing herbivores , and
15120-598: The next 30 years. In 1955 he received his PhD in English from Harvard University . In 1963 the French government honored Ong for his work on Ramus by dubbing him a knight, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes académiques . In 1966–1967 he served on the 14-member White House Task Force on Education that reported to President Lyndon Johnson . In 1971 Ong was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1974, he served as Lincoln Lecturer abroad for
15260-573: The niche is called the ecotope , which is defined as the full range of environmental and biological variables affecting an entire species. Organisms are subject to environmental pressures, but they also modify their habitats. The regulatory feedback between organisms and their environment can affect conditions from local (e.g., a beaver pond ) to global scales, over time and even after death, such as decaying logs or silica skeleton deposits from marine organisms. The process and concept of ecosystem engineering are related to niche construction , but
15400-531: The number of nitrogen fixers , can lead to disproportionate, perhaps irreversible, changes in the system properties." Biodiversity refers to the variety of life and its processes. It includes the variety of living organisms, the genetic differences among them, the communities and ecosystems in which they occur, and the ecological and evolutionary processes that keep them functioning, yet ever-changing and adapting. Noss & Carpenter (1994) Biodiversity (an abbreviation of "biological diversity") describes
15540-399: The observed data. In these island models, the rate of population change is described by: where N is the total number of individuals in the population, b and d are the per capita rates of birth and death respectively, and r is the per capita rate of population change. Using these modeling techniques, Malthus' population principle of growth was later transformed into a model known as
15680-406: The organization and structure of entire communities. The loss of a keystone species results in a range of dramatic cascading effects (termed trophic cascades ) that alters trophic dynamics, other food web connections, and can cause the extinction of other species. The term keystone species was coined by Robert Paine in 1969 and is a reference to the keystone architectural feature as the removal of
15820-479: The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins was supervised by the young Canadian Marshall McLuhan . Ong also received the degrees Licentiate of Philosophy and Licentiate of Sacred Theology from Saint Louis University . After completing his dissertation on the French logician and educational reformer Peter Ramus (1515–1572) and Ramism under the supervision of Perry Miller at Harvard University in 1954, Ong returned to Saint Louis University , where he would teach for
15960-406: The primary task of media ecology. "I don't see any point in studying media unless one does so within a moral or ethical context." Postman's media ecology approach asks three questions: What are the moral implications of this bargain? Are the consequences more humanistic or antihumanistic? Do we, as a society, gain more than we lose, or do we lose more than we gain? Walter J. Ong was a scholar with
16100-468: The published work of George Perkins Marsh ("Man and Nature"). Within an ecosystem, organisms are linked to the physical and biological components of their environment to which they are adapted. Ecosystems are complex adaptive systems where the interaction of life processes form self-organizing patterns across different scales of time and space. Ecosystems are broadly categorized as terrestrial , freshwater , atmospheric, or marine . Differences stem from
16240-502: The rate of change in population size ( d N ( t ) / d t {\displaystyle \mathrm {d} N(t)/\mathrm {d} t} ) will grow to approach equilibrium, where ( d N ( t ) / d t = 0 {\displaystyle \mathrm {d} N(t)/\mathrm {d} t=0} ), when the rates of increase and crowding are balanced, r / α {\displaystyle r/\alpha } . A common, analogous model fixes
16380-424: The same limiting resource ; one will always out-compete the other. When similarly adapted species overlap geographically, closer inspection reveals subtle ecological differences in their habitat or dietary requirements. Some models and empirical studies, however, suggest that disturbances can stabilize the co-evolution and shared niche occupancy of similar species inhabiting species-rich communities. The habitat plus
16520-399: The site will disappear unless rescued by an adjacent source patch or environmental conditions become more favorable. Metapopulation models examine patch dynamics over time to answer potential questions about spatial and demographic ecology. The ecology of metapopulations is a dynamic process of extinction and colonization. Small patches of lower quality (i.e., sinks) are maintained or rescued by
16660-460: The society that created it. This differs from the viewpoints of scholars such as Neil Postman, who argue that society should take a moral view of new media whether good or bad. McLuhan further notes that media introduced in the past brought gradual changes, which allowed people and society some time to adjust. The first period in history that McLuhan describes is the Tribal Age. To McLuhan, this
16800-524: The study of ecology into a conceptually manageable framework, the biological world is organized into a nested hierarchy , ranging in scale from genes , to cells , to tissues , to organs , to organisms , to species , to populations , to guilds , to communities , to ecosystems , to biomes , and up to the level of the biosphere . This framework forms a panarchy and exhibits non-linear behaviors; this means that "effect and cause are disproportionate, so that small changes to critical variables, such as
16940-408: The study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people. An environment is, after all, a complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving." Media ecology argues that media act as extensions of the human senses in each era, and communication technology is the primary cause of social change. McLuhan is famous for coining the phrase, "
17080-430: The study of language and poetics, which was also known as grammar. The printing press in the nineteenth century and the telegraph led to both the modern newspaper and also to journalism as an academic pursuit. The introduction of broadcasting in the form of radio, following on the heels of mass circulation newspapers, magazines, as well as the movies, resulted in the study of mass communication. Due to these technologies,
17220-431: The study of media ecology, it is argued that through technological advancements in media, many societies have become a " participatory culture ". Tom Valcanis argues that this is very easily witnessed by looking at the rise of Apple's iPhone. "If the technology is the medium in which a culture grows, the interactive and user oriented nature of these technologies have given rise to a participatory and 'mash-up' culture in which
17360-414: The study of media environments. The European version of media ecology is a materialist investigation of media systems as complex dynamic systems. In Russia, a similar theory was independently developed by Yuri Rozhdestvensky . In more than five monographs, Rozhdestvensky outlined the systematic changes which take place in society each time new communication media are introduced, and connected these changes to
17500-432: The sum of the components explain the properties of the whole, such as birth rates of a population being equal to the sum of individual births over a designated time frame. The main subdisciplines of ecology, population (or community ) ecology and ecosystem ecology , exhibit a difference not only in scale but also in two contrasting paradigms in the field. The former focuses on organisms' distribution and abundance, while
17640-619: The theory McLuhan had established. According to Postman, media ecology emphasizes the environments in which communication and technologies operate and spread information and the effects these have on the receivers. "Such information forms as the alphabet, the printed word, and television images are not mere instruments which make things easier for us. They are environments – like language itself, symbolic environments within which we discover, fashion, and express humanity in particular ways." Postman focused on media technology, process, and structure rather than content and considered making moral judgments
17780-407: The time; media determine what we know and how we feel about what we know; and media connect us to others. Communication media have penetrated the lives of almost all people on the planet, arranging people into an interconnected human community. Marshall McLuhan defined media as anything requiring use of the human body. Under this definition, both computers and clothing can be identified as media. When
17920-489: The total awareness of environment, characteristic of oral cultures, yet to an extended or 'global' level." McLuhan developed an idea called hot and cold media. Hot media is high-definition communication that demands little involvement from the audience and concentrates on one sensory organ at a time. This type of media requires no interpretation because it gives all the information necessary to comprehend. Some examples of hot media include radio, books, and lectures. Cool media
18060-670: The tree responds more slowly and integrates these short-term changes. O'Neill et al. (1986) The scale of ecological dynamics can operate like a closed system, such as aphids migrating on a single tree, while at the same time remaining open about broader scale influences, such as atmosphere or climate. Hence, ecologists classify ecosystems hierarchically by analyzing data collected from finer scale units, such as vegetation associations , climate, and soil types , and integrate this information to identify emergent patterns of uniform organization and processes that operate on local to regional, landscape , and chronological scales. To structure
18200-415: The underlying causes of these fluxes. Research in ecosystem ecology might measure primary production (g C/m^2) in a wetland in relation to decomposition and consumption rates (g C/m^2/y). This requires an understanding of the community connections between plants (i.e., primary producers) and the decomposers (e.g., fungi and bacteria). The underlying concept of an ecosystem can be traced back to 1864 in
18340-439: The use of a location by the animal." For example, a habitat might be an aquatic or terrestrial environment that can be further categorized as a montane or alpine ecosystem. Habitat shifts provide important evidence of competition in nature where one population changes relative to the habitats that most other individuals of the species occupy. For example, one population of a species of tropical lizard ( Tropidurus hispidus ) has
18480-401: The ways of producing and accessing content are deconstructed, uploaded, mixed, converged, and reconstructed through computers and smartphones mediated by online platforms; it becomes a 'participatory culture'..." "The medium is the message" is the most famous insight from McLuhan, and is one of the concepts that separates the North American theory from the European theory. Instead of emphasizing
18620-412: The world becomes a nosy generation where everyone knows everyone's business and everyone's business is everyone else's. This phenomenon is called the global village . Later scholars have described the growth of open access and open science , with their potential for highly distributed and low cost publishing reaching much larger audiences, as a potential "de-professionalizing force". Robert K. Logan
18760-459: The world has a ripple effect into other countries. This seems like a common sense idea today, where the internet makes it possible to check news stories around the globe, and social media connects individuals regardless of location. However, in McLuhan's day, the global village was just becoming possible due to technology like television and long-distance phone calls. This concept has become one of
18900-525: The world was taken from one era into the next. In order to understand the effects of symbolic environment, McLuhan splits history into four periods: the Tribal Age, the Literacy Age, the Print Age, and the Electronic Age . McLuhan states that, in order to study media effectively, one must study not only content but also the whole cultural environment in which media thrives. He argues that using
19040-435: Was a time of community, with the ear being the dominant sense organ. With everyone able to hear at the same time, listening to someone in a group was a unifying act, deepening the feeling of community. In this set up, McLuhan argues, everything was more immediate, more present, and fostered more passion and spontaneity. The second age McLuhan outlines is the Literacy Age, beginning with the invention of writing. To McLuhan, this
19180-487: Was a time of private detachment, with the eye being the dominant sense organ. Turning sounds into visible objects radically altered the symbolic environment. Words were no longer alive and immediate, they were able to be read over and over again. Even though people would read the same words, the act of reading made communication an individual act, leading to more independent thought. Tribes didn't need to come together to get information anymore. The third stage McLuhan describes
19320-593: Was coined in 1866 by the German scientist Ernst Haeckel . The science of ecology as we know it today began with a group of American botanists in the 1890s. Evolutionary concepts relating to adaptation and natural selection are cornerstones of modern ecological theory . Ecosystems are dynamically interacting systems of organisms, the communities they make up, and the non-living ( abiotic ) components of their environment. Ecosystem processes, such as primary production , nutrient cycling , and niche construction , regulate
19460-462: Was in exploring how the transition from orality to literacy influenced culture and changed human consciousness. In 1978 he served as elected president of the Modern Language Association . Ong was born on November 30, 1912 in Kansas City, Missouri . His parents were Walter Jackson Ong and Blanche Eugenia née Mense . In 1929 he graduated from Rockhurst High School. In 1933 he received
19600-404: Was part of a broader process of the general application of the ecological metaphor to the social sciences and humanities in the postwar period. There is still a scholarly debate over who coined the phrase "the medium is the message". Author Niall Stephens argues that while most attribute the metaphor to Marshall McLuhan, it is better directed to Neil Postman, who helped popularize McLuhan under
#448551