media theology: media ecology

Showing posts with label media ecology. Show all posts

[Live Video] McLuhan's Tetrad: 1 Tool You Need in a Media Toolkit

In the thirteenth video of Adam Niven' s #FBLiveVideoChallenge for Media Theology Adam introduces one tool that you must have in a media theology toolkit.

[Live Video] Thinking Beyond Content: McLuhan and Probes

In the eleventh video of Adam Niven' s #FBLiveVideoChallenge for Media Theology Adam introduces Marshall McLuhan and one of his probes about media.

[Live Video] Transformers and Proclaimers: What's that all about?

This is the fourth video of Adam Niven' s #FBLiveVideoChallenge for Media Theology. In it Adam expands on the terms Transformers and Proclaimers as they are presented in Woods and Patton's Prophetically Incorrect: A Christian Introduction to Media Criticism.

[Live Video] For those you came in late - What is Media Theology all about?

It seemed prudent to start out giving some context to why I chose the term Media Theology for the symbol of what I try to talk, teach and inspire on. You can read a bit more about it over on the About page. But even better, you can check out what I had to say in the video below:

The term Global Village was coined by Marshall McLuhan. In the The Gutenberg Galaxy he wrote:

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

Yet what McLuhan never suggested was that the Global Village was inhabited by a singular cohesive tribe. The emphasis was that the "tribal drums" of the electronic age bring together those who previously were not. That the information from everywhere returns the sensorium bias to acoustic space - rather than the linear bias of print.

This week has seen mega hype surround the release of the new Star Wars trailer and Back to the Future day. And whilst perhaps we've shifted some of our viewing over to high rating, high production TV like Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Breaking Bad or Mad Men...so that movies aren't having the influence the once did, the adage still runs true: narratives shape our lives.

This weekend we had a couple we'd met recently over for a meal. We met them through the release of a documentary about their journey in starting Milk and Honey - an Australian organisation operating an English School in Sihanoukille, Cambodia. Having been to Cambodia ourselves a number of times working alongside Serve Cambodia it was easy to be able to talk about a shared experiences. One of which was having to hand wash laundry.

This week the world was thrown into shock as it found the oldest Playboy excuse is soon to be become reality:

"Oh you found my Playboy. I buy it for the articles."

That's right, Playboy announced it will be having a change of direction (come March next year) and follow Tobias Fünke's lead into the world of never nudes. That's right, according to CEO, Scott Flanders, when you're "one click away from every sex act imaginable for free...it's just so passé..."

Being too young to have been exposed to McLuhan in his heyday, my discovery came a number of years ago was kind of like pulling a loose thread on a woolen sweater. Like many, my first exposure was to his most infamous aphorism

the medium is the message

but without notice, it became: the medium is the massage; the medium is the mess-age; the medium is the mass-age; the tedium is the message; and the tedium is the mass-age. All of a sudden I had my hands full of loose wool and McLuhan was saying "See, it's a unicorn".

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. Monday #4

Today's M.E. Monday is from Mcluhan:

"Xerox comes as a reverse flip as the end of the Gutenberg cycle; whereas Gutenberg made everybody a reader, Xerox makes everybody a publisher" (McLuhan UnBound: #5, 2005).

M.E. Monday #3

This week, here's a little gem from Neil Postman:

"New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thought develops" (Technopoly, 1992).

M.E Monday #2

So today's M.E. Monday is proudly brought to you by Walter Ong:

The changes in today's sensorium as a whole have been too complex for our present powers of description, but regarding the fortunes of the word as such one fact is especially noteworthy: the new age into which we have entered has stepped up the oral and aural. Voice, muted by script and print, has come newly alive (The Presence of the Word, 1967).

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.