We're all living in the Global Village:But We're Still not a Tribe

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.

The Resurgence of Vinyl Records and the Rhythm of Life

Having been a collector of music on vinyl record for around 20 years now, it's a bit of a treat to be seeing a resurgence in its availability.

which kind of fits with McLuhan's tetrad concept of retrieval...where a previously obsolesced medium is brought back in a new way...

And whilst it's not a pure retrieval sense, because there's not a new medium that is retrieving the vinyl, perhaps it is a growing awareness in some of the ways the rapidly shifting media ecology is having unwanted impacts on our relationship with music.

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 #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.