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Media Ecology
Marshall McLuhan

MASS COMMUNICATION: MEDIA AND CULTURE

Chapter 25
 Media and Culture
Semiotics 
Chapter 25
 Media and Culture
Semiotics 

Chapter Outline 9th Edition

  1. Introduction.
    1. Marshall McLuhan believed that media should be understood ecologically
    2. Media ecologists study media environments seeking to understand how people interact with media and how those interactions shape our culture and our daily experiences.
    3. Changes in technology alter the symbolic environment—the socially constructed, sensory world of meanings that in turn shapes our perceptions, experiences, attitudes, and behavior.
  2. The medium is the message.
    1. We’ve accustomed to thinking of the message as separate from the medium itself.
    2. McLuhan blurred the distinction between the message and the medium.
    3. When McLuhan said, "the medium is the message," he wanted us to see that media—regardless of content—reshape human experience and exert far more change in our world than the sum total of all the messages they contain.
    4. We focus on the content and overlook the medium—even though content doesn’t exist outside of the way it’s mediated.
  3. The challenge of media ecology.
    1. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
    2. All environments are inherently intangible and interrelated.
    3. An environment is not a thing; it is the intricate association of many things.
      1.  Invisibility of environments
        1. We have trouble recognizing “the way media work as environments’ because we’re so immersed in them.
        2. We need to focus on our everyday experience of technology.
        3. A medium shapes us because we partake of it over and over until it becomes an extension of ourselves.
        4. It’s the ordinariness of media that makes them invisible.
      2. Complexity of environments
        1. Research on media ecology is rather sparse because it takes up the challenge of trying to understand the interplay between all of these things in a culture that changes at blazing speed.  
        2. McLuhan believed that it took a special ability to be able to stand back from the action and take in the big picture. 
  4. A media analysis of human history.
    1. The tribal age: An acoustic place in history
      1. The senses of hearing, touch, taste, and smell were more advanced than visualization.
      2. “Primitive” people lived richer lives than their literate descendants because the ear does not select.
      3. People acted with more passion and spontaneity.
    2. The age of literacy: A visual point of view.
      1. Literacy moved people from collective tribal involvement to private detachment.
      2. Literacy encouraged logical, linear thinking, and fostered mathematics, science, and philosophy.
    3. The print age: Prototype of the industrial revolution.
      1. The printing press made visual dependence widespread.
      2. The development of fixed national languages produced nationalism.
      3. McLuhan regarded the fragmentation of society as the most significant outcome of print.
    4. The electronic age: The rise of the global village.
      1. McLuhan believed that the electronic media are retribalizing humanity.
      2. In an electronic age, privacy is a luxury or a curse of the past.
      3. Linear logic is useless in the electronic society; we focus on what we feel.
    5. The digital age? Rewiring the global village
      1. The digital age is wholly electronic.
      2. The mass age of electronic media is becoming increasingly personalized.
  5. Ethical reflection: Postman’s Faustian bargain.
    1. Neil Postman believed that the forms of media regulate and even dictate what kind of content the form of a given medium can carry.
    2. Unlike McLuhan, Postman believed that the primary task of media ecology is to make moral judgments.
    3. New technology always presents us with a Faustian bargain—a potential deal with the devil.
    4. As for television, Postman argued that society lost more than it gained.
    5. Postman thought three questions should asked of any new technology.
      1. What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?
      2. Whose problem is it, actually?
      3. Is there is a legitimate problem here to be solved, what other problems will be created by my using this technology?
  6. Critique: How could he be right?  But what if he was?
    1. McLuhan did not adequately support his claims.
    2. His prose is very difficult to understand.
    3. Some lament that McLuhan was too private in his Christian faith and merely explored rather than openly deplored the effects that electronic media have had on public morals.
    4. Deterministic theories have difficulty with the criterion of falsifiability.
    5. Tom Wolfe suggests that McLuhan may be one of the great geniuses of our era.
    6. McLuhan used his perspective to shed light on all sorts of cultural phenomena that, while easy to observe, were no less bewildering.

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Archived chapters (PDF)
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New to Theory
Resources?
Find out more in this short
video overview (3:01).


Media Ecology
Marshall McLuhan

MASS COMMUNICATION: MEDIA AND CULTURE

Chapter 25
 Media and Culture
Semiotics 
Chapter 25
 Media and Culture
Semiotics 

Chapter Outline 9th Edition

  1. Introduction.
    1. Marshall McLuhan believed that media should be understood ecologically
    2. Media ecologists study media environments seeking to understand how people interact with media and how those interactions shape our culture and our daily experiences.
    3. Changes in technology alter the symbolic environment—the socially constructed, sensory world of meanings that in turn shapes our perceptions, experiences, attitudes, and behavior.
  2. The medium is the message.
    1. We’ve accustomed to thinking of the message as separate from the medium itself.
    2. McLuhan blurred the distinction between the message and the medium.
    3. When McLuhan said, "the medium is the message," he wanted us to see that media—regardless of content—reshape human experience and exert far more change in our world than the sum total of all the messages they contain.
    4. We focus on the content and overlook the medium—even though content doesn’t exist outside of the way it’s mediated.
  3. The challenge of media ecology.
    1. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
    2. All environments are inherently intangible and interrelated.
    3. An environment is not a thing; it is the intricate association of many things.
      1.  Invisibility of environments
        1. We have trouble recognizing “the way media work as environments’ because we’re so immersed in them.
        2. We need to focus on our everyday experience of technology.
        3. A medium shapes us because we partake of it over and over until it becomes an extension of ourselves.
        4. It’s the ordinariness of media that makes them invisible.
      2. Complexity of environments
        1. Research on media ecology is rather sparse because it takes up the challenge of trying to understand the interplay between all of these things in a culture that changes at blazing speed.  
        2. McLuhan believed that it took a special ability to be able to stand back from the action and take in the big picture. 
  4. A media analysis of human history.
    1. The tribal age: An acoustic place in history
      1. The senses of hearing, touch, taste, and smell were more advanced than visualization.
      2. “Primitive” people lived richer lives than their literate descendants because the ear does not select.
      3. People acted with more passion and spontaneity.
    2. The age of literacy: A visual point of view.
      1. Literacy moved people from collective tribal involvement to private detachment.
      2. Literacy encouraged logical, linear thinking, and fostered mathematics, science, and philosophy.
    3. The print age: Prototype of the industrial revolution.
      1. The printing press made visual dependence widespread.
      2. The development of fixed national languages produced nationalism.
      3. McLuhan regarded the fragmentation of society as the most significant outcome of print.
    4. The electronic age: The rise of the global village.
      1. McLuhan believed that the electronic media are retribalizing humanity.
      2. In an electronic age, privacy is a luxury or a curse of the past.
      3. Linear logic is useless in the electronic society; we focus on what we feel.
    5. The digital age? Rewiring the global village
      1. The digital age is wholly electronic.
      2. The mass age of electronic media is becoming increasingly personalized.
  5. Ethical reflection: Postman’s Faustian bargain.
    1. Neil Postman believed that the forms of media regulate and even dictate what kind of content the form of a given medium can carry.
    2. Unlike McLuhan, Postman believed that the primary task of media ecology is to make moral judgments.
    3. New technology always presents us with a Faustian bargain—a potential deal with the devil.
    4. As for television, Postman argued that society lost more than it gained.
    5. Postman thought three questions should asked of any new technology.
      1. What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?
      2. Whose problem is it, actually?
      3. Is there is a legitimate problem here to be solved, what other problems will be created by my using this technology?
  6. Critique: How could he be right?  But what if he was?
    1. McLuhan did not adequately support his claims.
    2. His prose is very difficult to understand.
    3. Some lament that McLuhan was too private in his Christian faith and merely explored rather than openly deplored the effects that electronic media have had on public morals.
    4. Deterministic theories have difficulty with the criterion of falsifiability.
    5. Tom Wolfe suggests that McLuhan may be one of the great geniuses of our era.
    6. McLuhan used his perspective to shed light on all sorts of cultural phenomena that, while easy to observe, were no less bewildering.

 
 
 
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