Media Ecology

This weeks readings and the material covered in the lecture brings about the topic of media ecology.

The first thing I associate media ecology with is this picture that was shown in the lecture of a nuclear family in the 1950s or 1960s, all sitting around the television harmoniously, watching a television program.

What is interesting to note is the fact that if you compare this image to a modern day family watching television, the scene is quite different. I can discuss my family watching television on a typical night. We are more than likely multi-tasking as one of us is usually on our phones on Facebook or texting, or someone’s on the iPad or mum or dad are on the telephone. We can hardly ever agree on something we all want to watch due to the large number of media flows that are presented to us through pay tv networks.

Just comparing these two scenarios depicts how media ecology has transformed due to the new technologies in the media available to us. Matthew Fuller (2005) describes media ecology as a euphemism for the allocation of informational roles in organizations and in computer-supported collaborative work. In other words, it describes how information flows are used to sustain what we now call a relatively stable notion of human culture.

Stuart Hall’s writings on Encoding and Decoding also link to the notion of media ecology and how modern day machinic and digital aesthetics have assisted in its development. Hall’s work is linked to fact that media ecologies can be broken down into separate parts of a process, and at each point undergoing treatment and filtering by specialization of interests.

It is interesting to note that due to these new technologies and new era of media and the way in which we use it, media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affects human perception, understand and feeling and how this interaction with media affects our lives.

Ideas about media change

What I am most looking forward to about taking ARTS3091 Advanced Media Issues, this semester is how we will be looking at issues that we are dealt with in our everyday life and ways of appreciating and understanding them further. This course is set out to discuss and look at the ideologies surrounding the types of advanced media issues that we deal with on a daily basis and question the quality of the types of technologies that we use. 

As individuals, we all process information differently and the way in which we perceive things varies. Each individual’s personal learning context is crucial in developing our skills and the way in which we explore information that we come across.

Change is something that has occurred since the beginning of time. Nothing has remained constant, especially in today’s society. We live in an era where new phones come out every month as well as different laptops, tablets and computers. As well as physical new technologies evolving, the way in which we use them is also changing. Technology is evolving so constantly that we are forced to learn how to adapt and use newer versions of devices that we have only just come to be familiar with.

The readings this week addressed the issues regarding how we live with technology and interpreting cultural history. What I found interesting was how Andrew Murphie describes technological determinism refers to the belief that technology is the agent of social change which is also linked to the idea of progress. As well as the fact that society is shaped by its dominant technologies. It is this sense of how technologies are changing that represent how society and its culture change over time. 

The reading by Jussi Parikka also demonstrates how different forms of media and technologies change over time. She suggests that 'Media archaeology' has been introduced as a way to investigate the new media cultures through insights from past new media. The key themes and contexts relating to media archaeology and the idea of it changing over time includes modernity (as a process of technological, social and economic components has proved to be a key ‘turning point’ in various media- archaeological theories), cinema, histories of the present and alternative histories. These key themes help us to understand that there are many avenues that technological change can go down, due to the large number of media that we are familiar with and how it has originated from the past. But even more so than the things we are familiar with, issues such as events can also be defined as changing.

An event can be defined as something that has a beginning and an end. In this case, almost anything can be called that, such as a human experience, activity or an idea.

While the concept of an event has been one that can be found in history, each one comes and goes at different times and they are each constantly changing. The way in which society and the culture within it has been depicted in the present day context has led to events and all types of technologies and devices being subject to change, and constantly fighting to stay new and updated.

I hope that this course helps me to question and understand more of what the values and meanings are behind all of these ideologies and issues surrounding media today. There is no question that change is around us everywhere we go, it’s just how we choose to deal with it that will help us accept it.