Media ecology

Media ecology theory is the study of media, technology, and communication and how they affect human environments. The theoretical concepts were proposed by Marshall McLuhan in 1964, while the term media ecology was first formally introduced by Neil Postman in 1968.Ecology in this context refers to the environment in which the medium is used – what they are and how they affect society. McLuhan proposed that media influence the progression of society, and that significant periods of time and growth can be categorized by the rise of a specific technology during that period. In other words, "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. An environment is, after all, a complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving."

To strengthen this theory, McLuhan and Quentin Fiore further claimed that each time period has an important medium that defines the essence of the society, which correspond to the dominant mode of communication of the time respectively. Media ecology argues that media act as extensions of the human senses in each era, and communication technology is the primary cause of social change. McLuhan is famous for coining the phrase, "the medium is the message", which is an often-debated phrase believed to mean that the medium chosen to relay a message is just as important (if not more so) than the message itself. Also of importance is idea of the global village, a notion that the world is interconnected in ways previously unseen. To understand how media affect large structural changes in human outlook, media are classified as either 'hot' or 'cool'. Additionally, McLuhan, with his son Eric McLuhan, expanded the theory in 1988 by offering the tetrad laws of media as an organized concept that allows people to know the laws of media and the past, present and future effects of media.

While Harold Innis was not a direct contributor to the theory of media ecology, much of his work would inspire McLuhan in developing his own ideas and the foundations of the theory. Innis was a professor of political economy at the University of Toronto who studied the role of communication technologies in societies and civilizations. He worked with McLuhan at the University of Toronto, serving as his mentor. In his seminal work, The Bias of Communication, Innis looks at various empires in history and notes their use of the written word. He suggests that mediums of communication directly correlate to the spread of knowledge in a society. Therefore, the medium can wield relative influence in that society. He termed this concept the 'bias of communication'.

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