Building on the work of Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman's first published definition was in his essay "What is Media Ecology," excerpted from “The Reformed English Curriculum,” High School 1980, ed. A. C. Eurich (NY: Pitman, 1970):"Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, feeling, understanding, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people. An environment is, after all, a complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. It structures what we can see and say and, therefore, do. It assigns roles to us and insists on our playing them. It specifies what we are permitted to do and what we are not. Media ecology tries to make these specifications explicit. It tries to find out what roles media force us to play, how media structure what we are seeing, why media make us feel and act as we do. Media ecology is the study of media as environments."
As Camille Paglia states in this clip from YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KIRjvvAegw), Media Ecology is an analysis of the entire environment within which we operate... that change us, that become us! I believe this type of analysis is essential for those responsible for making Christians!
While reflecting on the environments that shaped me as a youth and young adult, I am mindful of the myriad of complementary messages that were a part of my life. Repeating themes of God's unconditional love and a call to respond in love to build God's reign consistently came from my parents and extended family, my parochial school and high school communities, the communal worship experiences within which I was fed and sent. Stories of our ancestors in faith caring for the least of these were reinforced by Lassie saving the day, Laura Ingalls overcoming obstacles with grace and charity, and calls for social jusice in the folks songs we sang around the campfire. I recognize that the world that I thought I was in was not always the same as the world I was in. Critical thinking helped me recognize the levels of reality that can exist simultaneously. Still, there was a security in hearing similar themes from every aspect of my world and trusting that God is present.
Today, the world feels more fragmented. As John Westerhoff suggests, there is a "broken ecology." Messages compete with rather than complement the Christian Message. It is harder to discern what is "true." The focus is on me, not we.
Hopefully, by using an ecological lens we can make that which is implicit, explicit. By doing so, I believe that we can reclaim some control over the environment within which we operate and claim our role as God's stewards of all creation. Only then can we infuse it with values that encourage the common good.
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I am really excited to be in this class. As pertains to this specific post, I am really appreciate media ecology's function of making explicit all the implicit messages that work on us. I was prompted by Dr. J's reflection about the media ecologies she grew up in and how these reinforced a, while probably not monolithic, at least comprehensive Christian message.
My own upbringing was so different. I grew up in NYC and went to public school with mostly recent immigrants. Everyday I interfaced with people in very intimate ways who were so incredibly different than me. Not simply difference as in complementary, but difference as in not able to even remotely conceive of their religious realities with the framework of my own. I suppose in academic parlance, we would call this postmodernism.
My image of NYC is an analytically powerful one for me. I often think of the rooms in each of the various buildings throughout NYC as representative of vastly different philosophies. Downtown in the financial district the philosophy at play is one of economic capitalism and utility. But uptown at the synagogue where I was religiously raised the philosophy was one of superfluity and God's unconditional love - notions of utility did not factor in.
I suppose there is an inbuilt ease with which I reside in this postmodern world. But I am also very suspicious of this ease. I want to interrogate meta level truth claims and their inevitable hegemony, while also realizing I must operate within similar truth claims. I'm not sure how to reconcile this apparent relativism with commonsense reality that requires a consistent (?) ethics.
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