Lecture Ten Summary

Summary of lecture: The invisible environment and media and society.

*Media ecology-looks at media in the way you may look at the environment (biotic things- plants, humans and abiotics- rocks, nonliving things) Looking at how the media impacts and affects society.
*Internet is very involving (concerning hot and cold media)
*Laws of the media, 4 different laws
*The medium is the message-how media affect us, how we understand information and how we organise our daily lives.
*Tetrad of media- the new medium extends the last medium, it makes other technologies (such as television) obsolete, it retrieves information from older mediums and it reverses or flips when pushed to extremes.
*Neil Postman- founder of the medium ecology foundation. Understanding how media shapes our everyday life. Technology when used socially becomes a medium.
*Lance Strate- head of media ecology association. “Media ecology is the study of media environments”.
* Marshall McLuhan- no environment is perceptible. The fish in a bowl- the water is the fish’s environment. If food colouring is put in the water- the fish sees its environment is a new way. If you change the medium it can have significant effects on the environment
*Ash questions about the invisible environment (the media environment) so the invisible environment BECOMES visible!
* Relating this lecture to previous lectures:
Session 1- what is the invisible environment
Session 2- appreciating how environment has come to be as it is
Session 3- a shift in history about some ideas about social media
Session 4-introducing creative commons (in order to shape relationship/environment between social media and the law)
Session 5- Philosophy-the nature of reality (the biggest invisible environment of ALL)
Session 6- Video games, an example of a particular medium
Session 7 and 8- Politics (is a big part of our environment- especially in new media technologies)
Session 9- Artwork, idea of the internet as a medium but a medium of creativity- unique to the internet.
* The three ecologies: environment, social and mental (not part of media ecology but remarkably close to media ecology)
*The internet is a network (no leader of the internet)
* Barry Wellman- change in place-to-place connectivity to person-to-person connectivity (we are all networked individuals)
*The experience of everyday life is not based on one medium, but MANY- multiplexity
*If our environments are invisible we need to constantly draw attention to them!