 In a modern sense, when we say the word ecology or ecological, sometimes our mind automatically drifts to environmental sciences, things to do with nature and preserving the natural world around us. And that certainly is related to ecology and an important aspect of that word and use for that word. But ecology and ecological really just refers to in general an interconnectedness between things or a relationship between things or the sense of community and how that impacts each of those things and how they work together and how they work individually and so forth. So that's the broader sense of ecological brings us today to our study of media. So we're going to take a look today at ecological analysis as a framework for critical media studies and apply ecology to the world of media. So to do that, let's start with exactly what we mean by that. So ecological analysis is simply examining media and the role of media ecology in the perception, understanding, feeling, and value of an artifact. So applying that sense of the community or the world in which that media was created and where it lives and the world that finds itself now, examining that world of media ecology and applying that into the perception, understanding, feeling, or value and or value of an artifact. This is really ecological analysis is really grounded in what we call medium theory. Medium theory simply says that the technology or individual medium of communication, remember medium is just a channel of communication, the means through which that message is relayed. So the technology or individual medium or channel of communication is equally important or in some cases even more important than the content of the media to our to understanding our social environment. So we can look at not only what the media says, what that what that artifact is, what what message is trying to convey, but how they choose to convey it. And that that medium, that channel is significant in helping us understand that and helping us understand how it fits into that environment, how it impacts those things. So that's medium theory and medium theory really at this point is just a kind of an umbrella theory for a variety of other things. And we're going to focus on two very specific types of media theory or extensions of media theory in this video. So we're going to take a look at technological determinism and media ecology, the extension none of that into media ecology. So but to start, we're going to take a look at this specifically at medium theory. Now, medium theory, again, it has to do with the channel of communication and how that impacts how that communication and that artifact affects the environment around it. So medium theory starts with the principle that each medium has a relatively unique and fixed set of characteristics. So there are things that are true about these things when we look at the different types of mass media, we know that radio is different than TV and TV is different than different social media platforms and all of those are different than newspapers and so forth, right? Each of them has unique and fixed sets of characteristics and we can see this even more clearly in modern times here if we look at specifically at social media and think about the different social media platforms and how they're different. Each of them has unique characteristics, things that are established about them, things that we attach to each of these things. So they are they are unique and they have this fixed set of characteristics that set them apart from others. Every medium has that then. So these characteristics then produce a particular communication environment. So the type of characteristics and things like that about that specific medium will then again establish a kind of particular communication environment will lend itself to specific things we think then about again looking at different types of social media for example Twitter versus Facebook versus Instagram. And I know that I hear a lot of people like especially celebrities or people who are prominent in media talking about how they don't even get on Twitter anymore. It's just mean, it's just people complaining, it's just people trying to bring them down or trying to bait them into something. And so they just, I've heard a lot of people just say, look, I just avoid Twitter if you're known personality, it's just not on Twitter. I don't really check it. I don't pay any attention. They say I focus on Instagram where there's more positive posts and they like the pictures and things. So the general sense at least at this moment is that Twitter is for arguing and for mean people and Instagram is for more just social interaction and positivity and Facebook is for old people and Snapchat and the others are for younger people. But so Facebook has largely been abandoned for people of my age or older. But Twitter's an important avenue for news gathering and for sharing messages of that nature. But really it's become very divisive in many ways because of the different characteristics, both that it's a limited set of characters and that just the way that it's been adapted for use in our society today that produces that particular communication environment has that feel. Twitter has that kind of mean feel to it. And Instagram just at the moment anyway has a more positive vibe. It seems like so the characteristics that are going to produce that particular communication environment. Then finally, the communication environment has consequences for human consciousness and social organization. Now, bear in mind these consequences could be positive or they could be negative could be mixed bag. Typically it's that mixed bag. It's a little bit of both. We sacrifice one for the other, but it's going to impact our consciousness and the way that we organize socially. So we can look at this. One example of this would be back when we had the huge days of network television, network television was king. Really, if you were going to watch TV, you were going to watch a couple of these channels. Cable was there, but even that wasn't nearly as popular shows at that time. Popular shows at that time. We're getting tens of millions of viewers in every episode, right? That's unheard of today. We probably won't ever see that again because a media landscape is so fragmented. People find their own specific things. And so you don't see those large groups of people tuning in for the same thing on a Thursday night or on a Wednesday night or whatever. So that the next day when you're at work, everybody's talking about that. We don't have that because we don't have the prominence of network, the limitations of network television anymore. We have the ability to seek out and watch something when we want and how we want and what we want on all of that. But for example, when we had network television, you had one prominent example of this was from the television show Will and Grace. And the impact that many people believe that it had on the understanding and acceptance of the LGBTQ community. And maybe even hastening us toward legalization of gay marriage, right? I mean, it could have had that big of an impact. It was one of those things that really touched everybody in the country in some way. That doesn't mean everybody liked it. Doesn't mean everybody thought it was positive. But it did. I mean, but everybody was aware of it. And so you had that central identification of that artifact because of the media that was prominent at that time, right? Now in the age of social media and fragmentation, you just don't have that anymore. Another way to look at this is the idea of social media has been great for helping us maintain connection to family and friends over the years. And we stay in contact or at least see pictures and things of people that we would never have seen maybe prior to that. Or prior to that time, these are people we would have lost touch with and not seen as much and not been able to know what they were doing every day and what they're eating every day and so forth. We wouldn't have those pictures of their food all the time. But at the same time, social media is very cultivated, right? In the sense that we choose what to put on there and what not to put on there. Typically, we're only putting our best stuff on there. We're putting our highlights on there and things we're not putting that. You know, and then when we spill spaghetti sauce all over the kitchen, we're putting the perfect picture of our family on there, right? So it can in that sense, though, because that's all we see if people can create this kind of unrealistic identification of what we should be and make us feel worse about ourselves than we can have. That's a very real impact these days is that social media in some ways makes people feel worse about themselves because they feel like they're not keeping up. They see all these other things, not thinking about the fact that this is highly cultivated, that these people are having all the same struggles, more than likely having all the same struggles as everybody else. But that's not what we're seeing, right? So that's been another impact of the change in technology and the way that the medium then has impacted how we see ourselves, how we see our place in society and how we view culture in general. One final example here is the way that we use social media to kind of coalesce as groups and in movements, how social media can create that movement so much faster and so much easier than it would have been possible before that. We see that examples of that all the time with groups really rising and getting together and becoming extremely popular and powerful because of their social media presence and ability and the connection that people have there, right? So that's a very real thing. But at the same time, then again, because we're kind of forming these groups and tribes in social media, we also have some issues because social media is anonymous when we want it to be. That can be anonymous, which gives people much more confidence in how they talk about themselves and what they say to other people, the rise of what we call the disinhibition effect. So that when we're communicating via social media, our inhibitions are lowered. And we say things to people that we might not say to them if we were face to face with them. If we were communicating to them on an in-person basis, these are things we probably wouldn't say to them or about them if they were face to face. But because of the anonymity of social media and the distance, the disconnection between us because there's a piece of technology between us, then we find that confidence. Our confidence online is much larger than it usually is probably offline because of that disinhibition effect. And we do and say things we wouldn't otherwise. And really in some ways politics, we can see this very clearly, almost have red Twitter and blue Twitter, right? In terms of Democrats and Republicans and only extreme ends where they take these extreme stances. And because of our media environment, we get into these echo chambers where we only hear things that we already agree with and people are feeding that. And so anybody who dares to contradict whatever it is we believe, boy, we shout them down in the strongest possible terms and tell them how dumb they are and all this kind. I mean, in some ways has brought us together. Social media has, but in many ways it has also created some large fractures in relationships and in our relationship as a nation really. So again, positives, negatives, it's usually a mixed bag. It's hardly ever one thing or the other and hardly anything in life is one thing or the other entirely. And the media environment is no different than that. So about medium theory just talks about how the channel that we use for this does affect because the characteristics of that channel, it impacts and has an effect on how we communicate, how we relate, and how we organize as a society then. So one of the most significant theories to evolve out of medium theory is technological determinism, which was put forth by this gentleman here, Marshall McLuhan. So Marshall McLuhan was a professor who developed this idea of technological determinism. He basically said that a society's technology determines its cultural values, social structure, and history. That all of these things really are so intertwined with technology and are pushed forward by this technology. And that in addition to that, then social progress is driven by technological innovation. So that it's, you know, that we see these major leaps in society that then the major leaps that our society has taken forward has been a direct result of the development of significant technology of some sort. And so social progress is driven by technological innovation. Then he indicated that it also has a significant impact technology does on the nature of human relationships. So technological determinism then seeks to understand how technology impacts human relationships and what the connection is there. He started by looking at what he'd and describing this, the history of the world via this kind of media. So media history starting with the tribal age, right, where when we initially existed in a preliterate society. So this was before the written word when we were completely reliant on oral communication, oral history, and everything had to be spoken word. We had no written communication. We were in the tribal age and everything was very connected. People were very much connected to that tribe, very the tribe was central to everything. And people, because if you went 10 miles away, then you had somebody speaking a different language and having different cultures. And you just wouldn't survive there, maybe. So you were really reliant on the tribe for your survival and certainly for any information, any understanding of your history and of the world around you. And we were totally reliant on your tribe and on people then who spoke the same language as you. But then we have the development of the written word, and we have what we call the literacy age. So written communication was developed so that people communicate across distances, people could share history across a longer period of time by writing it down instead of just having to rely on somebody else telling them what it was. And that allowed us to kind of separate a little bit from the tribe. We were still very much connected to the tribe, but we could be physically somewhere else and still be connected to that tribe, still get written messages and still have an understanding of who we are and what was happening, those types of things, even though we weren't necessarily in the same geographic location. So we started to see a little bit of separation then at times. Then you have the development of the printing press. And this just changed everything. It's one of the most significant inventions in the history of the world is the printing press. This allowed a greater number of people to be literate by far. I mean, a massive explosion in the amount of literate people that you have in the world, people who could read and write, because the resources are now available to do that. So you have then the proliferation of kind of independent thinking. You're no longer relying on someone else to share this information with you or just having to believe what they say about something. Now you can think for yourselves. You can read it and learn it for yourselves. You can think for yourself. So the print age really did all of that for us, but it also just allowed us then to be much less centralized around a tribe. We could be in a lot of different places and still get the information that we needed, still gain an education, still learn about our history and still communicate with our community, even though, again, we're not physically near them. So you see this kind of coincided then as well with the expansion of the United States here in North America, for example, people exploring the European exploration of the United States was fueled by the print age. You could be out on the frontier, but still be connected. So you didn't have to rely on being in a central location to be connected with your community. So the print age really pushed humans further apart from one another in a tribal sense. The final nail in that tribal coffin, so to speak, that mindset came with the electronic age, the development of radio and television, because these really allow us to be completely apart from our tribe and yet still be incredibly connected to it. We're all, again, watching the same TV shows, for example, when we had, especially the advent of network TV, we only had a couple of channels, even when I was growing up. We really only had a couple of channels. We'd cable a little bit later, but we watched all the same TV shows. When I went to school, it was a pretty good chance that everybody else had watched the same thing I did on TV the night before, because there wasn't much else on and because these shows were so popular then and had such a large viewership that we were still incredibly connected, incredibly well informed, even though we were very much separated, we weren't. And we didn't have that kind of interconnectedness with those around us. We did when we were in that tribal sense. So we have individualism, the development of the individual as the central component in our story, as opposed to I'm a part of the shared history, the shared existence and collectivistic existence. So the electronic age really presented us with the opportunity to be connected and yet separate at the same time. Now, that's as far as McLuhan got because he passed away before we got into the more modern technology, but now we have a couple of different names for it. But what we're going to call it is the new media age. We are in that new media age where now, in the electronic age, we were reliant on those central providers and producers of content that got to all of us. Again, we were all watching the same TV show because that's what was on and it was really tough to make a TV show and put it out there. So there were only a couple of people doing it, a very small group of people that were doing that. So we all just watched whatever they were putting out. In the new media age, that's not the case. Everybody's a producer of content, right? And everybody's sharing it with one another and it's very decentralized. So all the information is very decentralized. So we're now not only consumers of the media, but we are producers of the media. We have a multitude of content creators as we know and we have the ability to connect with people on a level and have all this knowledge at a level that we've never had in any point in human history, for sure. So that's the next kind of, again, brings us together, brings us some connectedness, but at the same time even isolates us even further and gives us this false sense almost in some ways of connectedness, gives us a really almost false sense of connectedness even though we are in many ways extremely isolated. So we have this new media age and so just kind of walks you through McLuhan's media history and he would say though that technology then of course is the driving force behind all of these societal developments and the most significant impact on society is the technology that we use and specifically that we use to communicate. McLuhan was famous for saying this. He said, the medium is the message. The medium is the message. He went on to say this is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium that is of any extension of ourselves because we are creating that media result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves or by any new technology. So he would say the medium is the message in the sense that how that information is conveyed and how we receive it and how we engage in that media is just as important as the content itself of that message. Okay, so that's technological determinism in a nutshell. Moving beyond that we had a gentleman named Neil Postman who really developed what we call media ecology sort of a modernization and a further extension of technological determinism taking it beyond the heat. And Postman said that holistic systems-based examinations of symbiotic relationship between humans technology and environment that is media ecology. A holistic systems-based examination of the symbiotic relationship meaning that shared relationship back and forth between humans technology and the environment. Remember McLuhan said no technology drives society technology drives culture. Postman says that's really this combination of everything kind of pushes each other and it's humans technology and the environment all kind of come together and push each other forward. Right, I haven't had the symbiotic relationship with one another. So our aim really is to increase the awareness of those mutual effects. The aim of media ecology should be to increase the awareness and be aware of the effects between these things and how they do impact one another. That this is a dynamic process rather than as McLuhan said technology as the singular driving force. So it's not just technology pushing us forward. It's a dynamic process that changes and goes in waves and varies. In a sense it really is very much like when I said earlier when we think of ecology we think of the environment. This really is media as this sort of to use an analogy of the ecology like you would have on the African plants right here on the Sahara Plains or whatever. We have this ecology and all these animals and the resources and the environment all have this symbiotic relationship. They all work together and when you change something within that if we had this setting and then we drop in a T-Rex right that's going to be a problem as we learned fully in Jurassic Park and then the Jurassic World movies we know that that would be an issue right that that would change the dynamic here but it is always changing as the water goes away the animals migrate differently which causes different things and then that changes the water flow itself and then it just so all of these things affect one another it's not just one thing driving everything else forward in media ecology it's that all of these things work together and they influence one another and that then changes the entire environment. So again just to summarize your technological technological determinism says that first technology evolves humans then adapt to that then the technology evolves and humans adapt again and so forth but it's the technology that drives that and I mean people are coming up on that technology but we are constantly then being driven and pushed forward by that technology but postman and media ecology then have a different cycle for that cycle would say that the mediated communication is there right we have this this mediated communication that exists this communication that's going out to the world then new tools are developed as a result of that right we as a society develop new tools and we develop new ways of doing things and eventually you know as we saw for example mediated communities again to look at social media as an example at the development of social media right so we have this mediated mediated communication this form that that is that now exists right so take facebook or twitter or whatever it is and these new tools are developed then right so from if you had facebook for a long time then twitter came along and kind of changed the game so new tools are developed people are learning how to use those then you have the adoption or sorry adoption of that new technology right the adoption of that new technology you have people on the forefront you have people who the first ones who used facebook or the people who first started using twitter or instagram or whatever you had some significant people adopting this new technology and it grew further and further in the society to the point where then became this normalization and now it's it's crazy if you don't have a facebook account or if you're not on social media that's that's considered abnormal right to not have any of that all of that will then of course impact our mediated communication as we've seen for example I think you draw a direct line from social media to the development of streaming technologies and the way we view media in that way now and the way we consume television differently now so and that's going to create new things if we're seeing now with them you know we just it's constantly evolving and we affect it and it affects us and so forth so we are in fact living in the era of new media then but we were firmly in that era of new media and and that brings with it a lot of different considerations and challenges and opportunities and things so let's take a look at that for a second as we think about them the era in which we live and how that affects how we interact with our media so defining the new media first of all new media is any media that uses computing technology to create store and distribute data so anything essentially that has a microchip would be considered new media right so anything that has microchip so certainly your phones your tablets even your TVs now radio certainly all of those things now have microchip so really they're all kinds of new media in a sense but but really has to do with anything that uses that computing technology in some way so it has a microchip then we're calling it new media so some of the characteristics of new media include first of all that it's digital okay it's digital it's it exists in digital forms even beyond I grew up using I grew up with cassette tapes and CDs and albums and things like that or you know TV that was that was analog on a TV on a television set just you know but now everything is digital everything is is available through that the computing technology and so pretty much any media that we're going to interact with is available in a digital form it's also the variable new media is variable so we don't just want our TV shows on the TV anymore I don't just want to watch my TV certainly don't just want to watch it at a certain time or day I want to have it available anytime but also I want to be able to watch it on my phone or I want to be able to to watch it on my tablet or my computer or the TV or all at once or push it from one to the other I want it to be variable it's got to be flexible in that regard right so it's got to it's got to have that sense of variability it also is interactive okay in new media is interactive used to be again in the in the even in the electronic age we're talking about radio TV in the electronic age was not interactive it was one way I didn't really communicate a lot with the television shows or different people like that it was it was you know but now we can directly reach out to those things it's very interactive we have the ability to respond to and vote on things in the moment right for these game shows and things we can vote or talent shows we can vote on these things in the moment we can join groups and influence what happens on a show or whether a show is canceled or not it's very interactive the new media is very interactive it's also very connective in the sense that it's very brings this together in a way that you know we get these groups for example you could you know you really enjoy a show or or a band or whatever it can it can really help you establish a connection with one another but and you have the avenue to find that connection through you know through exploration in new media as well to find other people who also love that thing and want to be a part of it and it's very connective it's also very virtual highly virtual right so it's it has this idea of fantasy though too I mean that it doesn't have to be there in real life it's very much a virtual experience for us so some of the impacts of new media some of the ways this has impacted us first of all are associational that new media is associational when I was growing up everything was very linear A to B to C right when I read a book it was from the first page to the last page when I listened to music it was you know on a cassette tape you just listen to it straight through basically you didn't just pick one song and play it I mean it was a pain you had to rewind and do a lot kind of stuff or to find a song was difficult so it was very linear right but new media is a very associational it's very you know jumps from here to there and it's you know doesn't have to happen in a straight line it's not intended to be taken in in a linear way right so instead of reading a book from front to back and you know like I said I would start a book at the page one and I would go straight through I mean that's how now not only for reading for pleasure but our textbooks work that way and that's how we learned was from you know page one to the end I listened to tapes for example I listened to a lot of music including this my favorite album and Justice for All by Metallica I love that album I would listen to it from start to finish front to back all the way through though wouldn't just you know pick a couple of songs and put them on a mix even when you could but that was a hassle so you had I just listened to it from start to finish from front to back all the way through and there was sometimes a theme that would go through that music has changed significantly because it's not associational in that way anymore and now you can just serve whatever the web is non-linear you go you get pulled down these rabbit holes right or rabbit trails and and you end up on who knows where on you that happens to me on youtube all the time I end up on all kinds of different videos home improvement videos that I didn't know I was wanted to learn and you know about like doing electrical work and things that I didn't even know I wanted to know about but there I am three hours later I'm clicking on these links and I'm going through and it's very non-linear the same with our TV it's no longer really a linear thing where you know that you have to be there Thursday nights at 8 30 if you want to see the show and it's not going to be you know re-airing or you can't record it and that kind of thing really without a vcr it's a hassle so you just were there at 8 30 on now I can watch what I want when I want I can bounce around from show to show I can come back to it I can put it on different different types of media platforms and things so it's very associational what we would call association it's not linear at all it's all over the place here it's also contingent new media is contingent there are very few any more things that we would say you know this is they're very few absolute truths about the media first one not only do we have to question it and we have to really think about it but but for whatever standpoint you can find you can find somebody else or some other thing to support the opposite view right so now everything is very contingent and maybe yeah this is true but I guess maybe this is true as well and it may only be true until I hit the refresh button I was right and then it may be something else maybe true right so I don't know we feel like knowledge today is very contingent and not as you know definitive it used to be you know what you read in a book was gospel and that was it now we can go find other information to kind of contradict that if we wish media and new media is also presumptive and this is in combination of a couple of different things a couple of different words it's first of all consumptive so we so we do consume media but we also produce media again many of us are content creators just like I am and you're if you're watching this video if you've made it this far thank you very much for watching and for paying attention but but you know I am a presumptive media user right so I'm not only consuming media I certainly consume a lot of media I watch videos I watch TV I read things and so I consume media but I'm also producing it I'm a content creator so I am I am an example of a presumptive person that applies that term would apply to most of us to to some extent to some to some you know to some degree we are all presumptive and that's another impact of the media is that we've all become presumptive and finally media is effective it's much more deeply personal in many ways because the way we view it is so individualized the way we interact with media is so individualized and so personal that it has become effective it really affects us on an emotional level much more than the media has in previous times because that media was created for millions and millions and millions of people to watch or or thousands of people to read or whatever and had to really appeal to that specific audience and didn't really connect with them we knew that and it didn't really connect with the other you're reading a newspaper is fairly impersonal even watching a TV shows fairly impersonal but now the way we consume media is so again personal so intimate in a sense that it's very effective and it really has a much stronger effect on us emotionally so there's much more connection in that way so lots of ways that media impacts us I do want to point out the context matters we need to remember this as well that the media is created in a particular time in a particular place in a particular society and culture so we need to remember the context matters so for example you know it's not just as simple as ABC right because we have ABC may also be 12, 13, 14 but sometimes those are the same thing right so how do we know if that's a B or if it's a 13 what context matters when it's in the middle of the when it's between an A and a C that's a B when it's between a 12 and a 13 that's a 14 right even though it's really the same thing context matters and the same is true for media context matters to media so you know as a child of the 80s I can tell you group watching a lot of different movies and from that area and some of them have not aged well so context matters when you go back and watch 16 candles for example you meet this character named Long Duck Dong which first of all that the probably the name would not be appropriate at this point in our culture but ma'am what a what a huge insensitive stereotyping of an Asian person a young Asian man is Long Duck Dong I mean just every stereotype you can think of is in that movie and and portrayed by this poor guy and so you know that's an example or you know another popular movie in the 80s was The Toy where Jackie Gleason essentially buys or pays Richard Gleason to be a toy for his son because he's rich and can do that I mean that's not something you would probably that's not a movie that probably gets made today you know he had music people like Two Live Crew which their their big song that was a huge controversy I mean this was enormous was Me So Horny a song that now would almost be able to be played on the radio right on on regular radio maybe not quite that far but certainly would be available on YouTube and everywhere else was a huge thing I mean lots of lawsuits they wouldn't abandon music wouldn't abandon the song and that just wouldn't be the case today but even now as we get into more current times you had movies like I now pronounce you Chuck and Larry not very sensitive to the idea of gay marriage because at that time it wasn't really taken seriously so I mean there's a lot of things in that movie that are that are questionable or you see a movie like Shallow Hell where you know and you have Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit right and not a very good one but these are things that would not run today not be made today but you have to remember in the context and that's not to say they were they were good at that time but but it was acceptable it was different in those times so you have to view it with that context in mind right sometimes we we get so focused on this specific thing and a specific whatever we're looking at we're in this box and we can't figure out what it is and it doesn't make sense but so we've got to pull back though and see the whole picture and understand okay in the 80s yeah people were were not very sensitive about Asian stereotypes at all so that's why this was considered acceptable and and to be and and considered funny in that movie a funny character and a popular character a well-known character from that movie because we didn't know we weren't sensitive we didn't think about those things so we got to pull back and consider that as a part of these things when you examine that you would not want to to do an analysis today of 16 candles by our standards you've got to apply the standards of that time if that's what you're really doing okay all of this to say that that we live in this media ecology it's all over the place and it's it's really wide and broad and it's magical and it's it's you know has positive consequences and negative consequences but we've got to consider all of that as we view and examine and analyze these different artifacts I hope this helps you understand ecological analysis as a form of critical media studies I really hope this helps it makes sense and gives you some background and understanding of that if you have questions about ecological analysis or any other type of critical media studies please feel free to email me I'd love to hear from you there in the meantime I hope that this will again help you have that context and help provide the understanding of how media is a part of our world but and shapes our world but it's also shaped by us and and just the important perspective of media ecology as we examine different media artifacts