Speak To Me In a Language I Can Hear

This line from The Smashing Pumpkins song Thirty-Three has always had a strange ressonance with me. It grabs for me the idea that even though we may be able to listen to a language we may not always hear it. I remember one experience I had when I visited the USA for the first time.

[Live Video] Communication: Perspective Matters

In the 25th video of Adam Niven' s #FBLiveVideoChallenge for Media Theology Adam continues the communication theme and explores the difference perspective makes.

[Live Video] Words Don't Have Meanings

In the 23nd video of Adam Niven' s #FBLiveVideoChallenge for Media Theology Adam puts forward a pretty important concept to understand when it comes to communication.

[Live Video] Media Theology Toolkit: Communication

In the 23rd video of Adam Niven' s #FBLiveVideoChallenge for Media Theology Adam continues the overview of his Media Theology Toolkit ebook that he has been working on in the background.

What is Communication? "Communication Fast

In the ninth video of Adam Niven' s #FBLiveVideoChallenge for Media Theology Adam sets viewers the challenge of trying to not communicate for 24 hrs.

Are you a Christian Leader Ambivalent About Social Media? Perhaps you should be more respectful.

So in the first post of this series I laid out the three most likely positions when it comes to social media platforms. And number two was ambivalence.

Not really into it, but you've maybe got a social profile on a platform or two.

Which ultimately can become quite a disrespectful stance to have. Just like any social situation, there are rules to abide by on social media platforms. And one of the key rules that enables social media platforms is that you need to be social.

Are you a Christian Leader and Not Interested in Social Media? You're failing the next generation.

If you're a Christian leader then your stance towards Social media is probably going to fall into one of three places:

1. Living it: you've got plenty of social profiles and presence and see it as an excellent tool in your ministry.
2. Ambivalence: Not really into it, but you've maybe got a social profile on a platform or two.
3. Opposed to it: Don't have any social profiles and it drives you a little wild to see how often others are always on their phones.

Well I'm going to start at the bottom first...don't worry, we'll be working our way to the top over the next couple of weeks...but if you're opposed to social media, it may just be you're to much in love with your the way you want the world to be.

M.E. Monday #7

M.E. Monday comes this week from Lance Strate:

"Individually and collectively, the relationship between human beings and their environments is one that is fundamentally indirect. Externally, stimuli excite and irritate our sense organs and nervous systems. Internally, we construct a map of the environment out of the various excitations and irritations that we experience, a map that may be more or less structurally homologous with the outside world, but a map that is, simply stated, not the territory  itself, as Korzybski famously put it...And out relationship to the outer environment, being indirect, is therefore mediated, hence McLuhan's observation that the medium is the message" (On the Binding Biases of Time, 2011).

M.E. Monday #6

Today's a little late (and not quite Monday) M.E. Monday comes from James Carey....perhaps not seen as an official Media Ecologist....but his contribution to the field of communication and its overflow into media ecology is worth noting:

"...one can draw a definition of communication of disarming simplicity, yet, I think, of some intellectual power and scope: communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed" (Communication as Culture 1989).

M.E. Monday #5

M.E. Monday #5 is proudly brought to you by Harold Innis:

"Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival" (Empire and Communications 1950).

M.E. Mondays

So I have decided to fire up the old blog again now that I have a bit more time to dedicate to it. And I'm going to start it up with M.E. Mondays.  M.E. Mondays are not all about me...but rather about Media Ecology....essentially a way of exploring the world that seeks to understand how our media work a bit like ecological environments to shape our world...

So each Monday I'm going to give you a bit of something to provoke your thinking from those who fit within the interdisciplinary field of Media Ecology. I'll throw a few of my own thoughts alongside each post to help get you engaged. So here is M.E. Monday #1.