Postman (Cited in Milberry, 2012) describes a ‘Media Ecology’ as follows: “In biology, a medium is defined as a substance within which a culture grows; in media ecology, a medium is a technology within which human culture grows, giving form to its politics, ideologies, and social organization.” This definition exposes how vast the concept of ‘Media Ecologies’ reaches, it shows its ever-encompassing nature whilst exposing that the relationship between all of the facets of media ecologies is not a simple one. Phillip Knightley (Cited in Deitz, 2010) argues that, “Access to media is a vital component in the democratic process.” Here he is exposing how it is not only imperative to interact with these technologies and be affected by it, but it is vitally important in order to one’s consciousness and to think democratically.
Bateson (2000) discusses an ‘Ecology of Mind,’ and hypotheses “That Human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction.” Here he is suggesting more abstract levels of communication (both explicit and implicit metalinguistic – the words used to communicate), are evident along with forms of metacommunication (how you say the words, in order to ‘read’/interpret their meanings). Bateson discusses here, face-to-face communication and the evident underlying metacommunication providing greater contextualisation behind the presented message, as it includes ‘redundancies’ or what Bateson calls ‘patterns.’ This being the extra stuff beyond the basic message. These ‘patterns’ help to crosscheck what’s being said to what’s meant. He develops this theory with the analogy of Chimps and how they differentiate ‘Play’ to ‘Combat’. Chimps have no discernible verbal cues stating the difference between play and combat, and so they must rely on these redundancies/‘patterns’ of metacommunication to realise the difference.
Felix Guattari (Cited in Media Ecologies And Digital Activism, 2008) further refines this discipline, and exposes a paradox, where he states, “Wherever we turn, there is the same nagging paradox: on the one hand, the continuous development of new techno scientific means to potentially resolve the dominant ecological issues and restate socially useful activities on the surface of the planet, and, on the other hand the inability of organised social forces and constituted subjective formations to take hold of these resources in order to make them work.” This here is what Bateson calls the ‘Double-bind’, where there is the opportunity for a potential outcome to have a negative effect, but by ignoring/doing nothing about it/doing something about it, also may have a negative effect.
The changing nature of the World makes it hard to show any certain cause-and-effect relationship between technology, society, culture, and even consciousness. But it is through Bateson that we learn that everything changes for us to learn further, and everything is there to be learnt.
References
Anon. (2008) ‘The Three Ecologies – Felix Guattari’, Media Ecologies and Digital Activism: thoughts about change for a changing world
<http://mediaecologies.wordpress.com/2008/10/07/the-three-ecologies-felix-guattari/>
Bateson, Gregory (2000) ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’, Steps to an Ecology of Mind Chicago: Chicago University Press
Deitz, Milissa (2010) ‘The New Media Ecology’, On Line Opinion: Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate <http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11410&page=1>
Milberry, Kate (2012) ‘Media Ecology’, Oxford Bibliographies, <http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756841/obo-9780199756841-0054.xml#>
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