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THE MEDIA

ECOLOGY THEORY

Media ecology theory centers on the principles that technology not only profoundly influences society, it also controls virtually all walks of life. It is a study of how media and communication processes affect human perception and understanding.

The term was first formally introduced by Neil Postman in 1968, while the concept of the theory was proposed by Marshall McLuhan in 1964.

PREPARED BY: JOY NUGUID

McLuhan, 1934 at cambridge university

McLuhan went on to study at Cambridge University, a school which pioneered modern literary criticism and here he met one of his notable mentors I.A. Richards, a distinguished English professor.

McLuhan admired Richard's approach to criticism 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"

It was this element of Richards' perspective on communication that influenced the way in which McLuhan expressed many of his ideas.

McLuhan's well known phrase.

McLuhan used the approaches of Richards and William Empson 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 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.

Neil Postman

Media ecology "is concerned with understanding how technologies and techniques of communication control the form, quantity, speed, distribution, and direction of information; and how, in turn, such informational configurations or biases affect people's perceptions, values, and attitudes . . . 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 with in which we discover, fashion, and express humanity in particular ways."

Postman focuses on media technology, process, and structure rather than content and considered making moral judgments the primary task of media ecology. 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?

founded the Program in Media Ecology at New York University in 1971.

Core concepts

Media is infused in every act and action in society.

Media fixes our perceptions and organize our experiences.

Media ties the world together.

Assumptions of the Theory

McLuhan's media history

Tribal age - The first period in history that McLuhan describes is the Tribal Age, a time of community because the ear is the dominant sense organ. This is also known as an acoustic era because the senses of hearing, touch, taste, and smell were far more strongly developed than the ability to visualize.

Literary Age - The second stage is the Literary Stage, a time of private detachment because the eyes is a dominant sense organ; also known as the visual era. Turning sounds into visible objects radically altered the symbolic environment.

Print Age - The third stage is the Print Age, mass production of individual products due to the invention of the printing press. It gave the ability to reproduce the same text over and over again, making multiple copies. With printing came a new visual stress, the portable book.

Electronic Age - Lastly, the Electronic Age, 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 returned us to the tradition of sound and touch rather than sight. This phenomenon is called the global village.

Four Periods of the History