Media Ecology

Lance Strate

Media Ecology

An Approach to Understanding
the Human Condition

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Frankfurt • Berlin

Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Strate, Lance, author.
Title: Media ecology: an approach to understanding the human condition / Lance Strate.
Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2017.
Series: Understanding media ecology; vol. 1
ISSN 2374-7676 (print) | ISSN 2374-7684 (online)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017013834 | ISBN 978-1-4331-3121-9 (paperback: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4331-3122-6 (hardcover: alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4331-4005-1 (ebook pdf)
ISBN 978-1-4331-4006-8 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4331-4007-5 (mobi)
Subjects: LSCH: Mass media—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC P90 .S81825 2017 | DDC 302.2301—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013834

DOI 10.3726/978-1-4331-4005-1

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

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Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
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About the author

Lance Strate is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University and Villanova University’s 2015 Harron Family Chair in Communication. He is President of the New York Society for General Semantics, Trustee and former Executive Director of the Institute of General Semantics, Past President of the New York State Communication Association, and a founder and Past President of the Media Ecology Association. Dr. Strate is the author of Echoes and Reflections, On the Binding Biases of Time, Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World Revisited, and Thunder at Darwin Station. He is a recipient of the MEA’s Walter Ong Award for Career Achievement in Scholarship.

About the book

Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition provides a long-awaited and much-anticipated introduction to media ecology, a field of inquiry defined as the study of media as environments. Lance Strate presents a clear and concise explanation of an intellectual tradition concerned with much more than understanding media, but rather with understanding the conditions that shape us as human beings, drive human history, and determine the prospects for our survival as a species.

More than a summary, this book represents a new synthesis that moves the field forward in a manner that is both unique and unprecedented, and simultaneously grounded in an unparalleled grasp of media ecology’s intellectual foundations and its relation to other disciplines. Taking as its subject matter “life, the universe, and everything,” Strate describes the field as interdisciplinary and communication-centered, provides a detailed explication of McLuhan’s famous aphorism, “the medium is the message,” and explains that the human condition can only be understood in the context of our biophysical, technological, and symbolic environments.

Strate provides an in-depth examination of media ecology’s four key terms: medium, which is defined in much broader terms than in other fields; bias, which refers to tendencies inherent in materials and methods; effects, which are best understood via the Aristotelian notion of formal causality and contemporary systems theory; and environment, which includes the distinctions between the oral, chirographic, typographic, and electronic media environments. A chapter on tools serves as a guide to further media ecological research and scholarship. This book is well suited for graduate and undergraduate courses on communication theory and philosophy.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

Media Ecology

‘‘With characteristic passion and soulfulness, Lance Strate embarks on a metatask: to synthesize thinking about ‘life, the universe and everything’ through the lens of media ecology. In the process, he locates media ecology as the dynamic shift between figure and ground and as the basis for ‘understanding the human condition.’ Writing with an almost disarming ease that belies the complexity of the ideas he communicates, Strate brilliantly and reflexively mediates media ecology itself, bringing clarity to the Kekulé-like conundrums of an immense and increasingly relevant field. Anyone who thoughtfully enters and engages the environment of Strate’s book will be rewarded with moments of profound clarity, connecting ideas typically viewed as disparate or oppositional into patterns of deep understanding about media ecology—and about the process of living.’’

—Julianne H. Newton, Professor of Visual Communication,

University of Oregon

‘‘Lance Strate’s synthetic thinking in Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition opens up media ecology, allowing the reader to see how, as a field of inquiry, it applies to everything from language, media, and philosophy to our very understanding of what it means to be human living in a dynamic environment. Along the way Strate shows how media ecology connects with all the major approaches to communication study.’’

—Paul Soukup, Professor and Chair,

Department of Communication, Santa Clara University

“Lance Strate asks big questions—and provides a myriad of perceptive answers. This book is at once playful, poetic, and precise. The clear writing about complex ideas is a pleasure to read and offers many gifts of understanding.”

—Joshua Meyrowitz, University of New Hampshire

List of Illustrations

Preface

1Introduction

2Intersections

3Understanding Media Ecology

4The Human Condition

5Medium

6Bias

7Effects

8Environment

9Tools

10Conclusion

Index

←vii | viii→ ←viii | ix→

Figure 4.1. The Three Human Conditions/Media Environments

Figure 7.1. A Model of Communication Based on Formal Cause

Figure 8.1. The Ziggurat Model of the Oral Media Environment

Figure 8.2. The Ziggurat Model of the Chirographic Media Environment

Figure 8.3. The Ziggurat Model of the Typographic Media Environment

Figure 8.4. The Ziggurat Model of the Electronic Media Environment

Figure 8.5. The Alternate Ziggurat Model of the Electronic Media Environment

Figure 9.1. Pathways for Media Ecology Scholarship←ix | x→ ←x | xi→

The human condition is a middle ground, an environment that constitutes the medium of our being and becoming. We emerge, individually and collectively, out of those same gaps and cracks that, as Leonard Cohen observed, allow the light to get in, the interstices and intervals, the stuff that lies in-between, the manifestation of an ongoing process of mediating that surrounds and pervades. The inescapable fact of being stuck in the middle with you, as the song←xi | xii→ by Stealers Wheel laments, also applies to the writing of books, something I was painfully aware of as I worked on this book. It may seem otherwise, because the written word promotes an extreme emphasis on linearity, on sequence, continuity, progression, and more basically, an external, visual, lineal geometric arrangement that we, in turn, internalize (Carpenter, 1973; Lee, 1959; McLuhan, 1962, 1964; Ong, 1982, 2002; Schmandt-Besserat, 1996). Letter follows letter or in the case of non-alphabetic scripts, character follows character, word follows word, sentence follows sentence, paragraph follows paragraph, page follows page. The l-i-n-e is drawn, and quartered, giving rise to a rectilinearity based on the right angles of rows and columns, the grid locked into our consciousness, the rectangular page becoming the model and metapattern through which we frame our experience. The story line becomes the structure of our narratives (as opposed to the episodic), the line of argument becomes the logic by which we organize our discourse, the line of thought becomes the standard for coherent cognition, the line of sight becomes the basis of modes of perception dominated by vision, ultimately putting our world into perspective. Everywhere we look, we find ourselves surrounded by straight lines and right angles, in the objects that surround us, the sheets and screens, gadgets and furniture, rooms and buildings, architecture and thoroughfares. We have recreated our humanly-constructed environment in the image of the line, a form that is rarely found in our biophysical environment, with its rough, irregular textures and outlines, and the general curvature of space.

The contrast between orality and literacy is a contrast in form between ovality and linearity, in which the cyclical nature of time yields to the arrow of chronology, and the myths and legends of oral tradition, repeated endlessly in infinite variation, yields to the fixity of written historical narrative. At the start of the 20th century, Elbert Hubbard stated that life is just one damned thing after another, a quote later adapted by Arnold Toynbee to refer to history, a view that stands in contrast to non-western and pre-modern understandings of resurrection and reincarnation, sacred time and the eternal return to an Edenic golden age (Eliade, 1959). The shift is reflected in the changing sense of the term original, which once referred solely to the past, to beginnings, to the earliest and the archetypal, to ab origine, but has come to also refer to the novelty, to the newest, most unprecedented. The stress on this modern sense of originality is connected to the introduction of typography, the printed book, seemingly complete in and of itself, obscuring the intertextuality of all forms of composition. As Walter Ong (1982) explains, print gives rise to a sense of closure, as opposed to the openness of scribal copying, a process through which the written work changes from one copy to another, alterations being introduced both by intention and by mistake. Print leaves us with←xii | xiii→ the impression that the subject addressed between the covers of the book is in fact fully covered, singularly authored, and utterly original. And altogether complete. Typographic fixity turns the work into a closed system that intensifies the illusion that there is a true beginning, middle, and end.

I owe special thanks for feedback on drafts of this book to Corey Anton, Nora Bateson, Thom Gencarelli, Paul Levinson, Keith Roe, and Paul Soukup. Robert T. Craig’s invitation to write an entry on media ecology for the new Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy provided me with an opportunity to work out the structure of my synthesis of media ecology as an approach prior to the writing of this book. Portions of what came to be included in the discussion of the key term medium in Chapter 5 were first presented at a conference at the University of Oregon, organized by Janet Wasko, Jeremy Swartz, and Julianne Newton; a more elaborate presentation of the same material took place at a symposium hosted by the Institute of General Semantics organized by Martin Levinson, and I am grateful for their continued support as well. Other members of my intellectual and creative circles that I would like to acknowledge include Robert Albrecht, Stephanie Bennett, Eva Berger, Bini B.S., Cheryl Casey, Brian Cogan, Heather Crandall, Susan Drucker, Peter Fallon, Lewis Freeman, Martin Friedman, Callie Gallo, Fernando Gutiérrez, Bridget Hollenback, Octavio Islas, Susan Jasko, Adeena Karasick, Elena Lamberti, Yong Li, Paul Lippert, Robert Logan, Teresa Manzella, Alice Marwick, Eric McLuhan, Ashley Moore, James Morrison,←xiii | xiv→ Valerie Peterson, Mike Plugh, Shelley Postman, Phil Rose, Paul Soukup, Laura Trujillo, Ed Tywoniak, and Dale Winslow. I also would like to acknowledge the folks at Peter Lang, including Mary Savigar, Kathryn Harrison, Jackie Pavlovic, and Michael Doub.