Understanding Media Ecology

ISSN: 2374-7676

Media Ecology is a field of inquiry defined as ‘the study of media as environments’. Within this field, the term «medium» can be defined broadly to refer to any human technology or technique, code or symbol system, invention or innovation, system or environment. Media ecology scholarship typically focuses on how technology, symbolic form, and media relate to communication, consciousness, and culture – past, present and future. This series publishes research that furthers the formal development of media ecology as a field of study. Works in this series bring a media ecology approach to bear on specific topics of interest, including theoretical or philosophical investigations concerning the nature and effects of media or a specific medium. Further, this series also publishes books that examine new and emerging technologies and the contemporary media environment, as well as historical studies of media, technology, modes, and codes of communication. Scholarship regarding technique and the technological society is particularly welcome, as is scholarship on specific types of media and culture (e.g., oral and literate cultures, image, etc.). Publications may also consider specific aspects of culture (such as religion, politics, education, journalism, etc.); critical analyses of art and popular culture; and studies of how physical and symbolic environments function as media.

26 publications

Studies in Sociology: Symbols, Theory and Society

"The series has been created by Elzbieta Halas and Risto Heiskala in order to stimulate and develop cooperation in research on the meaning, forms and functions of symbolism in society. The series is open to various theoretical and methodological orientations in the studies of social symbolism. The aim of the series is to show the central place of the problems of symbolization and symbolism in sociology - processes of symbolization in everyday life, in collective actions, social movements, organizations, in the public sphere of institutions, as well as in the construction of collective memories and identities, in the construction of the state and the nation, and in international relations and in globalization processes. The series presents theoretical and empirical questions of symbolic power, symbolic hegemony, symbolic control and symbolic politics; integrating as well as transforming and liberating functions of social symbolism in the processes of interactions and communication which shape knowledge, values and social sentiments."

15 publications

The Westminster College Library of Biblical Symbolism

"This series encourages works of scholarship that explore the artistic and theological depths of biblical symbols. "Symbol" here means any well-known reality that is used to illuminate a more mysterious reality by means of the analogy between the two. The symbols can be objects, qualities, actions, roles, events, stories, or systems. "Exploring" symbols entails: painting a full picture of the well-known reality as the original writers and readers would have known it; establishing what the subject of the symbol was in particular instances; and seeing through the symbol to the depths of the subject. The books in this series may focus on a particular symbol (e.g. light, or shepherd, or the Exodus), on a particular type of symbolism (e.g. Paul's legal symbolism, or Flosea's personal symbolism), or on particular themes (e.g. the variety of symbols used to illuminate the mystery of human sinfulness and how those symbols are used to interpret each other). Still others may focus on particular books, such as Ezekiel or Revelation, exploring their main symbols. "

1 publications