Media Ecology Week 3

How do we know if we never experiment? (Fuller, 2005:1) This is the question I raise with regards to media ecology and it is certainly true of any human achievement in recorded history. More specifically what happens when seemingly parallel media forms come together and result in a complimenting or conflicting relationship. (Levinson, 1997, Fuller, 2005) We must consider what is formed or what is deformed or obliterated through the advances of cultural and social media, such as SMS ability to reduce highly evolved language to singular phonetic characters. This phenomenon is not in any sense modern as Levinson suggests it is a continued evolution from the mind to the slate to the screen and so on. (Levinson 1997:17)


To argue that the media ecologies exists in a state of harmony really does fly in the face of everything our parents, grandparents, teachers and literary geniuses have been espousing for our entire lives. Their view is that spelling, grammar, punctuation are to be preserved in such a way that one generation learns the language of the one before it. Of course language, like any other media is not impervious to change in both written and spoken form, so we end up with two pronunciations of the letter 'h' and 'z', the evolution of 'I' and 'my' into me and so on. But still there exists this monopoly on language by these institutions which seek to preserve language as an integral cultural icon. (Levinson 1997:14)


Language and the written word have for the most part eliminated performance media as the dominant means of passing on information leaving out many aspects of context. Instructions for example are best delivered through visual demonstration, but as a global civilisation we choose to learn from books rather than the actions of peers. This is how we have documented humanity for millenniums and how we now reference the development of new communication technologies. This is the "media ecology". The constant marriage of technological development with language. Both words give rise to a single entity infinite in nature and capable of fostering limitless outcomes. (Fuller, 2005:3)


However the utopia of the media ecology doesn't necessarily spawn endless combinations of successful media forms. Consider the limited social success of social media gone commercial media website 'Myspace'. The sites initial popularity with online individuals was diminished by the growing presence of commercially endorsed Myspace pages, forcing many users to migrate over to Facebook and Twitter. Compare this situation with Levinsons description of the events that led to the burning of the Library at Alexandria.(Levinson 1997:12-16) In both situations the threat of the destruction of what lies at the core of the media form, requires a migration or destruction of the information it contains. We can assume in most cases that Myspace users would have developed their Facebook and Twitter profiles based on the information they had either deleted from or left behind on Myspace


Bibliography:

Levinson, Paul (1997) 'The First Digital Medium' in Soft Edge; a natural history and future of the information revolution London: Routledge:11-20

Fuller, Matthew (2005) ʻIntroduction: Media Ecologiesʼ in Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture Cambridge, MA; MIT Press: 1-12