By Lance Mason

Dictionaries typically define media as the plural of medium, indicating mass media such as newspapers, television, radio, and the Internet. Definitions of medium focus on transmitting something between two things or facilitating the movement of something else. These understandings often frame the boundaries of media education or what is often called media literacy. Media, in this conception, is the transmitter of messages or the facilitator of content, and it follows that media literacy thus describes the process of analyzing media messages. 

Take, for example, the National Association of Media Literacy Education’s (NAMLE) basic definition of media literacy as “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication. In its simplest terms, media literacy builds upon the foundation of traditional literacy and offers new forms of reading and writing” (n.d.). There are a couple of things to note in this definition. First, the focus of media literacy practice on analyzing and creating content. Second, the explicit connection to literacy or the ability to read and write. These assumptions have predominated within the field since its founding and reinforce an emphasis of media education on message decoding, interpretation and meaning. However, there is a subfield of media studies that challenges these assumptions and provides an avenue for thinking differently about how media can be studied, media ecology.

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan published a revolutionary study of media in which he asserted “the medium is the message” (p. 24), or the medium itself holds greater importance than the particular messages that it may carry. Media scholar Lance Strate (2012) explains:

models of communication…typically present the medium (or channel) as an afterthought, suggesting that first we have a message, and then we decide on which medium to send it through. Based on this view, it is only natural to assume that messages exist in some ideal form, independent of the media, and unaffected by them.  The medium is the message is intended to correct this mistaken view by also conveying the idea that the medium precedes the message. We begin with a medium, for example, a language, and compose a message by selecting and combining elements of the medium, or in this instance the code, according to the rules of grammar…there is no information independent of form.  (p. 11)

According to McLuhan, messages do not exist independently of the medium in which they were created. Thus, the idea of media as merely a content delivery vehicle is problematic for understanding the full range of media’s societal consequences. 

Nearly a decade after McLuhan’s famous work, Neil Postman, who was greatly influenced by McLuhan, spurred the creation of an interdisciplinary doctoral program at New York University, which he dubbed media ecology. Postman (2006) avoided the literacy metaphor and – by way of McLuhan’s inspiration – employed a metaphor of bacterial cultures to consider the relationships between media and society: “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” (p. 62). In this conception, media are not characterized as mere transmitters of messages, as they are also the environments that provide contexts for individual and social behavior and the drivers of social understanding. One example is the role media play in politics, such as the Kennedy-Nixon debate where a majority of radio listeners found Nixon to have won, whereas a majority of televisions viewers believed Kennedy was the victor. Other examples include the role of television in elevating Ronald Reagan, who was able to use his acting acumen to great advantage in presenting himself as a charismatic leader, or the role of Twitter in boosting Donald Trump. Would either Reagan or Trump have been politically successful without galvanizing the unique affordances of particular media platforms? If your answer is “no,” then you’re beginning to understand “the medium is the message.”

In the late 1990s, scholars of media studies, sociology, and other disparate fields who were interested in media ecology came together to form the Media Ecology Association (MEA). Their peer-reviewed journal, Explorations in Media Ecology, has been published quarterly for 20 years now and is dedicated to expanding both the theory and practice of media ecology. Another media ecology journal is New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, which is a revival of an older journal edited by Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter that ran from 1957 to 1972. The editors also publish a media ecology blog.

Although the journal has a section for pedagogy, extended treatments of media ecology applied to media and technology education are difficult to find. The most famous attempt is McLuhan’s 1977 City as Classroom textbook, which was intended to provide a core text for media ecology activities in K-12 classrooms. However, teachers found it difficult to understand and implement and thus was never widely implemented. Since then there has been a dearth of accessible materials for classroom teachers. One of the goals of the Civics of Technology project is to address this deficiency. We believe media ecology encourages students and teachers to step back from the content of media and peek behind the curtains at what can be learned from the form and all that is relegated to the background.

References

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. A Signet Book. 

Postman, N. (2006). The humanism of media ecology. In C. M. K. Lum (Ed.), Perspectives, on culture, technology and communication: The media ecology tradition (pp. 61-69).  Hampton Press, Inc. 

Strate, L. (2012). The medium and McLuhan’s message. Razon Y Palabra, 80, Aug-Oct 2012.