Mediology

Mediology (from the French word "médiologie"), broadly indicates a wide-ranging method for the analysis of cultural transmission in society and across societies, a method which challenges the conventional idea that 'technology is not culture'. The mediological method pays specific attention to the role of organisations and technical innovations, and the ways in which these can ensure the potency of cultural transmission - and thus the transformation of ideas into a civilisational worldview capable of sustained action.

The term was first coined and introduced in French as "médiologie" by the French intellectual Régis Debray in the "Teachers, Writers, Celebrities" section of his book Le pouvoir intellectuel en France, (Editions Ramsay, 1979). The English form of the term became more widely known and respected in the English-speaking world with the publication of the key text on mediology in English, Debray's Transmitting Culture (University of Columbia Press, 2004). Mediology was taught for the first time in the Sorbonne (Paris) in 2007.

The practice of mediology is not a science, and thus is able to range across academic disciplines. The main areas involved are those of longitudinal history (the history of technologies, the history of the book, the histories and theories of aesthetics) and also research in communications and information theory.

Mediology is not a narrow specialist area of contemporary academic knowledge (as media sociology is), nor does it aspire to be a precise science of signs (as semiotics does). It differs from the models put forwards by communication studies, in that its focus is not isolated individuals and a fleeting few moments of communication. Instead mediologists study the cultural transmission of religions, ideologies, the arts and political ideas in society, and across societies, over a time period that is usually to be measured in months, decades or millennia. Debray argues that mediology... "would like to bring to light the function of medium in all its forms, over a long time span - since the birth of writing. And without becoming obsessed by today's media"

Mediology must thus closely examine the methods used for the memorising, transmission, and displacement of cultural knowledge in any milieu. But it must balance its understanding of these with an equally close study of our individual modes of belief, thoughts, and competing social organisations. Mediology must further understand that such transmission is not simply happening within a lofty linguistic or textual discourse, but that transmission takes an equally valid concrete form in which "material technologies and symbolic forms" combine to produce things such as rituals, architecture, flags, special sites, customs, typefaces and book bindings, smells and sounds, bodily gestures and postures, all of which have a potent anchoring role in cultural transmission among ordinary people.

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