Carlos A. Scolari - Universitat Pompeu Fabra carlos.scolari@gmail.com
www.digitalismo.com
www.hipermediaciones.com
www.modernclicks.net

1960s
McLuhan introduces the concept in private communications
1968
N. Postman
National Council of
Teachers of English
Conference
1971
Media Ecology program at
NY University
1960 1970
2000
MEA
Inaugural
Convention
1980 1990 2000
“Medium Theory”
Meyrowitz , J. 1985 No sense of place: the impact of electronic media on social behavior

‘Every writer creates his own precursors.
His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future’
(1964: 199).
Jorge Luis Borges
Kafka and His Precursors

N. Postman M. McLuhan
W. Ong
J. Goody
L. Mumford
J. Ellull
E. Havelock
H. Innis

Metaphor and theory
 ‘Metaphors matter’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).
 Metaphors are basic for scientific discourse and theoretical modelling
Boom of the ecological metaphor
 Cultural ecology (1955)
 Biosemiotics (1962)
 Biolinguistic (1967)
 Ecological anthropology (1968)
 Media Ecology (1968)
 Political ecology (1972)
 Sociobiology (1975)
 Human behavioral ecology (1975)
 Industrial ecology (1989)
 Spatial ecology (1989)
 Ecolinguistics (1990)
 Communicative ecology (1995)
 Historical ecology (1998)
 Information ecologies (1999)
Howard and Eugene Odum (1953)
Fundamentals of Ecology

Media as environments
 ‘ME is the study of media as environments’ (Postman, 1970).
 ‘ME looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value (Postman, 1970).
 ‘Media are extensions’ (McLuhan, 1964).
 ‘Technology alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance’ (McLuhan, 1964).
This is the environmental dimension of Media Ecology: media create an ‘environment’ that surrounds the individuals and models their perception and cognition.

Intermedia relations
 ‘The steadying influence of the book as a product of sustain intellectual effort was destroyed by new developments in periodicals and newspapers’ (Innis, 1951).

The potential of the telegraph to transform information into a commodity might never have been realized, except for the partnership between the telegraph and the press’ (Postman, 1985).
 ‘No medium has its meaning or existence alone, but only in constant interplay with other media” (McLuhan, 1964).
This is the intermedia dimension of Media Ecology: media are like ‘species’ that live in the same ecosystem and establish relationships between them.

Exploring a scientific metaphor means analyzing the semantic universe of the analogy, translating the basic assumptions from one field to another to check the strength of the metaphor and identify new questions and challenges for media studies.
I will limit my reflection to a short list of concepts:
Evolution
Interface
Hybridization

Origins
 Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859)
Dictionary
Mutation, natural selection, competence, extinction, bifurcation, micro-evolution, macro-evolution.
Key-ideas
 Ecology thinks in space while evolution thinks in time .
Evolution - Diachronic
(Temporal axis)
Ecology - Synchronic
(Spatial axis)

Expansion of the metaphor
 Evolution has been immediately applied to Social
Sciences (Marx --> 1867 Das Kapital)
 Evolution of technology : Simon, 1969; Basalla, 1988;
Kelly, 1992; Diamond, 1999; Saviotti, 2006; Ziman,
2000; Frenken, 2006; Arthur, 2009.
 Evolution of communication : speech, body-language, fiction and music (Mellor, 1990); art (Dutton, 2009); narrative (Boyd, 2009); literary genres (Moretti, 2005).

Questions
 Can media become extinct ?
 Are we assisting to the extinction of mass media and broadcasting?
 The history of media is full of technological fossils
(from papyrus to telegraph).
 But do media really become extinct? Do they, as McLuhan postulated, survive in the content of the ‘new’ media ?
Carlon, C. / Scolari, C. (2009)
El Fin de los Medios Masivos.
El comienzo de un debate

New media species

Punctuated equilibrium (Eldredge and Gould, 1972)
 Rapid events of branching speciation
 Applied by:
- Franco Moretti (2005) -> literary genres (1740-1900)
- Bob Logan (2007) -> explosion of languages
Questions
 Are we assisting to an explosion of ‘new’ media and communication practices?
 Can we re-write the history of media from this perspective?

Interface: a key-concept?
 Like system in the 1950s, structure in the 1960s, or text in the 1980s, interface may be the key concept of the new generation of social scientists.
 Human-machine interface
 Technology-technology interface
Key-idea
 Every media has an interface (human-technology interface) and, at the same time, every media is an interface (technology-technology interface).

Media interfaces
 The interface is the place where the evolution of the media is negotiated -> human-media coevolution
 The interface is also the place where media interact between them -> intermedia coevolution
Key-ideas
 The interface is the ‘environment’ that media ecologists have been analyzing for the last 50 years.
 The study of the interfaces could be considered the micro-level of Media Ecology analysis , the minimal unit of analysis (like the sign for Linguistics or the gene for Genetics)

Concept
 Coevolution is also a key concept for Media Ecology.
Questions
Human-media coevolution
 How do consumers (readers, viewers, users) coevolve with their media?
 How do media coevolve with their consumers?
Intermedia coevolution
 How do two or more media coevolve together
(cinema/TV, web/newspapers, etc.)?
 Hybridizations / Remediations

In a few words…
 To expand the ecological metaphor…
… mans to increase the dictionary and explore new research lines:
 Media evolution
 Interface
 Human-media coevolution
 Intermedia coevolution / Hybridizations

 Email: carlos.scolari@gmail.com
 Facebook: carlos.scolari
 Twitter: cscolari
 Blog I: www.digitalismo.com
 Blog II: www.hipermediaciones.com
 Website: www.modernclicks.net
Carlos A. Scolari
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Barcelona