🐰 Down The Rabbit Hole 🕳️

“Something essential to man's creativity, even in science, may disappear when the defiantly metaphoric language of poetry gives way completely to the denatured language of the computer.”

 - The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development, p. 93

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Before beginning this week's newsletter, I wanted to ask for your assistance: I am looking for someone to update the Gadfly Academy website. If you can recommend someone, please respond to this email...thanks so much in advance!

As I mentioned last week, we will be taking a brief break from our study of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death. In the meantime, we will revisit my interview with one of Postman's chief protégé's, Professor Lance Strate. You can watch the interview at the above link, or read the text below:

Herman:

Who are other seminal media ecologists?

Lance Strate:

There certainly are other people who are writing and thinking about media ecology, and much of the earlier work followed a different kind of pathway in introducing the field. That includes my first book, Echoes and Reflections, which was organized around key thinkers: a chapter on Marshall McLuhan, a chapter on Neil Postman, a chapter on Walter Ong, and so on. That’s a perfectly valid way to approach the subject.

As I mentioned earlier, we can speak of a “media ecology” of Marshall McLuhan, which has certain emphases and also omits or downplays some areas. That contrasts, for example, with the media ecology of Harold Innis, which emerges from a different background with different points of emphasis. This reflects a longer tradition—going back at least to the 1960s—of people attempting to coalesce these ideas, whether or not they called it “media ecology.”

One example that comes to mind is William Kuhns’s The Post-Industrial Prophets, published around 1973, which surveyed various thinkers and their approaches. That’s a fine and useful model.

However, what I wanted to do with my own media ecology book was to provide a synthesis. Others have done this in different ways. Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy is a kind of synthesis, though limited to the orality-literacy framework. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death also offers a synthesis, but it’s very much directed toward a specific cultural critique. Prior to that, McLuhan’s Understanding Media represented a pioneering synthesis, though it, too, was constrained by its time and its scope.

Joshua Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place is another example. It offers a wonderful synthesis, though one very much shaped by a social science perspective. His work integrates traditional media theorists like McLuhan and Innis with symbolic interactionists such as Erving Goffman and George Herbert Mead. From my perspective, this should all be considered part of media ecology rather than separate domains.

My goal was to offer the broadest possible integration and synthesis, to create a true entrée into the field in its entirety. And from there, ideally, others can build upon it. The hope is to say: “Here’s a step up—please put your feet here and take the next step forward.”

To date, I don’t know of anything that’s gone quite that far. But in terms of publishing and print media, it’s still relatively recent—it’s only been seven years since the book came out. Ideas like this take time to circulate and percolate. It took me, personally, close to two decades—maybe 22 years—to arrive at that synthesis. So maybe by mid-century, we’ll begin to see the next stage of development.

OK…that’s it for today...hope you enjoyed this excerpt from my interview with Professor Lance Strate! Have a great week/end!

Warmly,

Herman

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