Media ecology

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Media ecology is an interdisciplinary field of media theory involving the study of media environments. According to the Media Ecology Association [1], media ecology can be defined as "the study of media environments, the idea that technology and techniques, modes of information and codes of communication play a leading role in human affairs."

In 1977, Marshall McLuhan said that media ecology "means arranging various media to help each other so they won't cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages. And so you can do some things on some media that you cannot do on others. And, therefore, if you watch the whole field, you can prevent this waste that comes by one canceling the other out." (Source: Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, by Marshall McLuhan, edited by Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, Foreword by Tom Wolfe. MIT Press, 2004, p. 271)

Inspired by McLuhan, Neil Postman founded the Program in Media Ecology at New York University in 1971. He described it as

Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people.

Along with McLuhan and Postman, media ecology draws from the work of Harold Innis, Walter Ong, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Eric Havelock, Susanne Langer, Erving Goffman, Edward T. Hall, George Herbert Mead, Margaret Mead, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Gregory Bateson.

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The term media ecology has also been used in a mass media context for something quite different - the description of media industry developments and how they affect the public. This is particularly acute in Asia, where the term is often used in business and consumer contexts.