Lewis Mumford is considered one of the founding figures for the field of media ecology and is more often than not unsung and overshadowed by Neil Postman (Strate & Lum, 2000, p. 56).  Mumford drew his observations from his interest in architecture, design, and technology, and his media ecology encouraged considerations of the relationship between humans, media, and environments (Strate & Lum, 2000).  It was Postman who gave media ecology an institutional base and intellectual forum (Lum, 2000). The idea of or phrase media ecology was introduced by Postman in 1968 as the study of media as environments.  Strate explains, our understanding of media is not that of an object, institution, or organization, it is a very broad term that includes technology, symbol systems, code, symbolic form, and art.  You can reverse the definition and say that media ecology is the study of environments as media (Patti & Ciastellardi, 2012).

Media ecology is a field of study for understanding media, communication, and culture.  It attracts varied interpretations or reactions as to what it is or does.  It is the study of media environments and the idea that technology and techniques, modes of information, and codes of communication play a leading role in human affairs.  (Lum, 2000)

Early on in Postman’s study of media ecology, he begun to think about the institution of school as a medium for communication.  The school was just one medium through which a culture communicated some of its important ideas and I understood that were other media in the culture to do it (Lum, 2000, p. 3).  Strate indicates, the emergence of media ecology as a field of study or theoretical perspective was in part a response to the dominance at the time of the so-called administrative school of communication, which is rooted in the social scientific tradition and quantitative methods while focusing on the study of short-range media effects from the behaviorist perspectives.  At the same time, media ecologists were proposing the study of how change in the dominant form of communication media in society may facilitate large scale cultural changes. (Lum, 2000, p. 3).

de Castell et al. (2014) illustrates the idea of building as interface, the environment can be both a noun, and a verb.  As a noun, the environment is a building, a room, a place, a thing, and as a verb, the environment is transformed into an action or trade of constructing something – a medium (de Castell et al., 2014).  As de Castell et al. (2014), point out it’s important in new media studies to think about environments.  Environments are often unquestioned and invisible.  Eric Klopfer explains that classrooms and learning environments are complex systems.  The same situation, in the context of the same classroom when similarities vary ever so slightly can lead to widely varying outcomes.  As de Castell et al. (2014) indicates, designing sustainable educational ecologies means transitioning to a paradigm of students and teachers and designers and developers of new and emerging technologies, not just users and consumers of them.  Education is active, situated, knowledgeable, and productive and an ecology that demands its teachers and students to learn, themselves, how to maintain it, is as educative as it is equitable (de Castell et al, 2014).

Media ecology asks the fundamental questions, how do you define media, where do you look for cultural change, how do you link changes in our media environment to changes in our ways of behaving and feeling, what kind of subject is this to be, and where do we place it (Lum, 2000, p. 4).

 

References

de Castell, S., Droumeva, M. & Jenson, J. (2014). Building as interface: Sustainable educational ecologies. MedienPädagogik Vol. 24, DOI: https://doi.org/10.21240/mpaed/24/2014.09.08.X

Lum, C. M. K. (2000).  Introduction: The intellectual roots of media ecology, New Jersey Journal of Communication, 8(1), 1-7, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15456870009367375

Patti, E. & Ciastellardi, M. [mcluhanstudies]. 2012, January 4. What is Media Ecology? – Lance Strate for the International Journal of McLuhan Studies [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osKSiQVody4&t=117s

Strate, L. & Lum, C. M. K. (2000). Lewis Mumford and the ecology of technics, New Jersey Journal of Communication, 8(1), 56-78, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15456870009367379