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.