Media Ecology

Personal testimony by survivors of genocide or persecution has long constituted the gold standard for learning about human-inflicted tragedy. The physical presence of a survivor captivates audiences and lends immediacy to catastrophes that seem both unfathomable but also eminently repeatable. The Holocaust looms large as an example. The most aggressive efforts at preserving live testimony have centered on assembling archives of video testimonies. This transformation of live testimony into a different medium generates two key questions:
1. What value can personal testimony have when disembodied and presented in a medium more manipulable by the audience (via editing, selective viewing, etc.)?
2. How can mediated survivor testimonies serve as tools for preventing and counteracting prejudice?

As survivors of genocides pass away, their firsthand testimonies increasingly will be accessible primarily through video archives. The preservation of memory through video archives also exacts a price. Once a survivor’s testimony enters the archive, it risks becoming ossified as a static monument. The video preserves the definitive record not only of that survivor’s life, but it also endures as an instantiation of archetypal narrative templates that channel perceptions into familiar storylines. As these narrative patterns become embedded as expectations, they risk obscuring or marginalizing the complex panoply of ways the survivors dealt with their situations.

This project takes Holocaust survivor testimonies as its point of departure in assessing the pedagogical challenges and opportunities of video testimonies. Discussions focus on three types of mediated testimony: early non-fiction televised chronicles of Holocaust survivors (particularly the first appearance of a survivor, on the 1953 U.S. television series This Is Your Life); archival video testimonies; and “unsettled testimony” consisting of less structured, first-person testimonies that reveal the challenges of discursive representation. The final category includes testimonies of Holocaust survivors independently recorded by the author. Each type of testimony offers distinct advantages and limitations in reducing prejudice and increasing productive engagement with the global immigration crises that many politicians continue to foment into nativism and xenophobia.

Critical examination of each medium of testimony leads to recommendations regarding how to provide more thorough, nuanced understanding of refugees and immigrants in the present. Testimony from immigrants could put into practice several key lessons gleaned from Holocaust survivor testimony. At the micronarrative level, individual testimonies can provide counterexamples to categorical generalizations about immigrants. Attention at this level focuses on providing detailed context and background to demonstrate how immigrants do not necessarily align with how they are categorized by media and politicians. At the mesonarrative level, the diversity of narratives can activate themes and characterizations absent or suppressed in collective portrayals of immigrants. Metanarrative testimony reframes immigrants by offering new narratives that can reframe the role of immigrants in society, suggesting storylines that treat immigrants as contributors rather than invaders.

As the number of Holocaust survivors declines, their live eyewitness testimony will be preserved and communicated via other media. This transformation prompts a key question. What value can personal testimony have when disembodied and presented in a medium more manipulable by the audience? The response addresses three types of mediated testimony: the first televised broadcast of a Holocaust survivor's story, on the 1953 U.S. television series This Is Your Life; archival video testimonies; and "unsettled testimony" consisting of less structured, first-person testimonies gathered by the author that reveal the challenges of discursive representation. Each type of testimony offers distinct advantages and limitations in reducing prejudice and fostering understanding.

Las transformaciones en el mundo de la mediatización y sus relaciones
con diferentes campos de la vida social tensan las relaciones entre disciplinas. Es verdad que hace décadas las nociones de multi, pluri y transdisciplinariedad están en discusión y que sus esfuerzos de aplicación no siempre han dado resultado pero, como en tantos otros aspectos de la práctica de investigación, cada nuevo momento obliga a recuperar, aunque más no sea parcialmente, momentos previos.
Un campo que influye en las reflexiones e investigaciones sobre historia de las mediatizaciones, es el que tiene que ver con el lugar que debería ocupar la ecología de los medios para el estudio de los diversos sistemas de mediatizaciones y las hegemonías de unos sobre otros en diversos momentos de nuestra historia social y cultural. En momentos de cambios que parecen vertiginosos, esas relaciones se hacen más necesarias.
https://publicaciones.sociales.uba.ar/index.php/lis/article/view/3800/3125

A perspectiva teórica da ecologia dos meios, abordada por McLuhan (1962), Postman (1970) e Ong (1982), compreende as mídias como ambientes culturais imersivos, em que os aspectos relacionais ganham relevância. Migrando o foco dos efeitos das mídias para as linguagens que as constituem, a ecologia dos meios busca compreender as mudanças significativas que as tecnologias trazem nas esferas comunicativas, políticas, econômicas e sociais. O objetivo deste artigo é investigar a integração de tecnologias no ambiente escolar sob a perspectiva da ecologia dos meios, apresentando uma pesquisa desenvolvida entre 2014 e 2016 em oito escolas municipais da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. O estudo, de cunho qualitativo, envolveu 80 sujeitos de pesquisa, entre professores, diretores e coordenadores pedagógicos. Os resultados apontam para a presença da tecnologia na escola em sua vertente cultural e, ao mesmo tempo, para vicissitudes que envolvem o reconhecimento e a dificuldade em lidar com essa presença. Abstract: The theoretical perspective of media ecology, addressed by McLuhan (1962), Postman (1970) and Ong (1982), views the media as immersive cultural environments in which relational aspects gain relevance. Shifting the focus from the effects of the media to the languages that constitute them, media ecology seeks to understand the significant changes that technologies have brought in the communicative, political, economic and social spheres. The aim of this article is to investigate the integration of technologies in the school environment from the perspective of media ecology. It presents a study carried out between 2014 and 2016, in eight municipal schools in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The qualitative study involved eighty research subjects, including teachers, school Principals and pedagogical coordinators. The results show the presence of technology in the school from a cultural point of view and the vicissitudes that make it difficult for the school actors to recognize and deal with this presence. Resumen: La perspectiva teórica de la ecología de los medios, abordada por McLuhan (1962), Postman (1970) y Ong (1982), comprende los medios como entornos culturales inmersivos, en los que los aspectos relacionales ganan relevancia. La ecología de los medios busca comprender los cambios significativos que las tecnologías traen en las esferas comunicativas, políticas, económicas y sociales.

William Faulkner in the Media Ecology explores the Nobel Prize–winning author immersed in the new media of his time. Intersecting with twentieth-century technology such as photography, film, and sound recording, these twelve essays portray Faulkner not only as a writer looking back on the history of the U.S. South, but also as a screenwriter, aviator, and celebrity. This fresh, interdisciplinary approach to Faulkner presents an innovative way of reassessing a body of literary work that has engaged readers and critics for over sixty years. Essays by John T. Matthews, Catherine Gunther Kodat, Stefan Solomon, and Donald M. Kartiganer assess how Faulkner’s legacy has been shaped through media adaptation and public commemoration of his work. Jay Watson, Michael Zeitlin, Sarah Gleeson-White, Robert Jackson, and Sascha Morrell consider a range of media relevant to the creation of the writer’s stories and ways to recalibrate traditional thinking about his writing. Mark Steven, Peter Lurie, and Richard Godden examine how the vastly different mediations of both cinema and money influenced Faulkner’s work. Editors Julian Murphet and Stefan Solomon have brought together some of the most prominent voices in Faulkner studies, along with a number of emerging scholars, to construct a portrait of Faulkner as a thoroughly modern writer, as much attuned to the evolution of the contemporary world as he was to the past.

This essay was delivered as the presidential address at the annual convention of the Media Ecology Association on June 24, 2017, in Moraga, CA. This address draws on the work of Neil Postman to consider the connections between language, civility, and media ecology.

Vanishing, a uniquely designed book by Antonin Kratochvil, provides a compilation of images by a photographer who is distinguished by his great sensitivity to the plight of human beings and animal species seeking to survive in endangered habitats. The book provides a view into 16 of the most desperate conditions on Earth--"another planet's hell,"... Although dealing with the most extreme forms of environmental degradation, Kratochvil spurns the pushiness of news coverage ... responding instead with ephemeral occurrences encountered during everyday events. The stark black and white images never use sensational methods ...; instead the book is a project in personal subjectivity and understatement, accompanied by a sampling of big data about these sites from a variety of news feeds, remixed as literary montage.

Former President of the Media Ecology Association, Dr Phil Rose, ran for
office in the 2015 Canadian federal election. This article presents an interview with Rose in the wake of his defeat. To stimulate and organize the flow of the interview, and to guide our interrogation of Rose in an exciting way that is in accord with McLuhan’s media ecological approach, this article uses probes derived from reflections on McLuhan’s life-long study of politics and the political.

Reading noncompliance is a storied, perennial problem for college teachers. In cases where teachers assign primary source material as readings noncompliance is perhaps even more likely. In this paper, I share how I have increased student reading compliance and comprehension of primary source readings. First, I identify three sources of reading noncompliance by briefly, and very loosely, drawing on Corey Anton’s (2005) essay on contemporary reading atrophy. Second, I show how the use of enhanced PDF formatted readings, along with reading quizzes, can be used as an instructional technology helping introduce practices that counter student’s media-washed predispositions. To conclude, I offer teachers who may be “on the fence” about assigning difficult readings a reason for doing so, and support this perspective with a quick comparison of the formal differences between textbooks and primary sources readings in Media Ecology.

Traditionally marginalised groups now have more access to new and unconventional means to participate in politics, transforming the media ecologies of existing political environments. Contemporary feminist scholarship has centered on how women use new media technologies to serve political agendas. However, this literature focuses predominantly on women in the West, while women in developing countries, or Asia more generally, have been largely excluded from analysis. This article aims to fill this gap by examining Thai women's online activities during the 2013/2014 Bangkok political protests.

Cos'è un medium? Cosa mediano i media? Che rapporto c'è tra media e tecnologie? Nella definizione dei media entrano in gioco nozioni diverse e la loro sovrapposizione spesso crea confusione. I delicati rapporti che intercorrono tra soggettività, esperienza e media costringono a una continua ridefinizione dell'identità personale, ma nella contemporaneità caratterizzata dall'adozione del digitale come unico metodo di codifica, l'identità personale e la relazionalità interindividuale appaiono sempre più dipendenti da dinamiche incanalate a livello tecnologico-prima ancora di essere dirette a livello sociale o politico. In questo scenario, i risultati che emergono nell'arte contemporanea riescono a illuminare il rapporto tra media, tecnologie e identità, mostrando come sia possibile mettere in atto pratiche autonome rispetto ai percorsi imposti dagli impianti tecnologici. Le soluzioni adottate dagli artisti spesso riescono a innescare cambiamenti che s'insinuano nel sociale, dirottando gli sviluppi tecnologici. Le operazioni artistiche offrono spunti preziosi per affrontare criticamente le sfide della contemporaneità e attuare soluzioni praticabili dal basso. In un'analisi che incrocia sociologia ed estetica, Kosuth dialoga con McLuhan e Benjamin, la realtà virtuale a 360° è letta dalla prospettiva del panorama ottocentesco e dell'expanded cinema degli anni Sessanta, i social network sono messi a nudo dalle operazioni di Grosser e dei Liens Invisibles, Vertov inquadra profeticamente il ruolo dello spettatore nella nuova economia dell'attenzione sviluppata dalla rete, di cui i Vocaloid (gli ologrammi cantanti che si diffondono negli anni Duemila), sono l'ultima espressione.

In recent years, environmental awareness is growing all over the world, and we can hope that it will balance, at least in part, the damage that our species is doing to itself and to the planet on which it lives. Air quality and water availability, overheating, desertification are problems that our own development, surprising and in some ways exciting and wonderful, has brought with it. Now these problems are questioning the survival of humanity, and the voices that are raised - from the learned voices of scientists to the emotional and hopeful voices of the young people of the Friday for Future movement, passing through the Magisterium of Pope Francis - are therefore something more than a denunciation: they are a call to action, a passionate request to find new ways to defend our common good, the earth that feeds us and makes us live.
Perhaps comparing the dramatic quality of our environment to the problematic structure of communication may seem irreverent, yet this is precisely the challenge I want to propose: communication today (in its public version, which is not limited to media practices) presents a series of problems and critical points that have perhaps never before been noted, in spite of the extraordinary opportunities that the instruments of communication seem to offer to an increasing number of people. Some of these problems pollute daily life and have often dramatic consequences on social coexistence: they are - for example -
hate speech disseminated on social media, or false or unfounded knowledge sometimes replacing scientific evidence and even common sense. There are tendencies - such as the experience of being continuously connected, the need for self-exhibition, the sometimes unsustainable acceleration of our sense of time - that seem to bring new challenges to the definition of being human. Moreover, certain practices (think of the control to which users are subjected by platforms through the monitoring of their behaviour or the changing mechanisms of social influence, entrusted to celebrities who are not always reliable or worthy of trust) suggest a transformation of the mechanisms of collective life.
On the whole, therefore, some current trends seem to constitute a picture of degradation not only of the media, but more generally of that essential resource for the human species which is communication.
The parallel between environmental pollution and pollution of the symbolic, in short, is something more than a daring analogy. That is why I believe it is appropriate - and indeed urgent - to reflect on the quality of communication as a typically human resource, to identify its current state, and if possible to try to interpret the anxiety of the present time.
An approach of this kind can therefore be defined as ecological in two fundamental meanings. The first, inspired by ecology as a science, consists in describing the media as a whole, observing their evolution and questioning their consequences on human life. In this sense, the questions that are asked are: How is the media ecosystem configured today? What are its distinctive features compared to its previous stages? What role do the media play in shaping norms and customs today, and what forms of communication tend to prevail through them?
The second meaning, scientifically less correct, but now cleared in common language, is that of caring for the environment: if the consequences of the evolution of the ecosystem go in a direction that is threatening or at least dangerous to human life, ecological concern takes the form of strategies and behaviour that can reverse the trend, and save the life of our species. As far as the media and their recent evolution are concerned, the question is: can we imagine leading them in a more profitable direction, which is not limited to following the footprints of technological progress or the laws of the market? And as far as human communication is concerned: can we save its original function? What awareness must we reactivate in order to achieve this? And what basic approach can we use?
I have tried to present my arguments as clearly and linearly as possible, eschewing excessive specialisms, just as I have limited the bibliographic apparatus to texts that I consider useful for any further study by each reader. I think that the issues that this book touches on concern anyone, and that anyone should be able to understand them clearly, in order to exercise consciously their choices in the use of the media and more generally in communication with their fellow readers. The latter is - as I try to demonstrate in the book - the most fundamental of the common goods of our species: saving it means saving the human being.
An undertaking that deserves the commitment of all of us.

This free-to-download report brings together the best examples we’ve seen of how news and media organisations have risen to meet the challenges of COVID-19. It looks at a range of tips and tactics to help all kinds of publishers, from subscriptions to eCommerce, the state of ad tech, and tools for building loyalty.

The Publisher’s Guide to Navigating COVID-19 report’s 80+ pages are split into seven chapters covering the pandemic’s impact on the media, what it means for subscription strategies, and how publishers are building loyalty and engagement.

It concludes with a chapter exploring the legacy of COVID-19; the structural issues it has accentuated, the trends it has accelerated, and what this means for publishers looking at their business plans for 2021 and beyond.

The report also comes packed with charts throughout and a comprehensive appendix, as well as recommendations for further reading.

This article seeks to address the following question: how might analysing the implications of the panopticon for Facebook better inform understanding about social media communication? The panopticon derives from a prison system designed by Jeremy Bentham in 1791. Michel Foucault analyses the panopticon as a form of surveillance that controls human bodies. Facebook, a popular social networking site, allows users to share content with other users. Although the physical bodies of Facebook users might be invisible, they reveal information about their private lives in the content of their posts. I suggest that the users’ willingness to divulge information reframes Facebook from a neutral social networking site to a panopticopolis, an online space that controls users. Facebook functions as a panopticon by exercising control over the physical bodies of users in the real world as a result of surveillance over user content posted in the virtual world.

This paper discusses the origin, intent, observations and results of an innovative exercise conducted at the 7th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention. It uses several recent media ecology related publications to help interpret the exercise and meaning for the field and the Association. Using these references, the paper suggests that such exercises when combined with other aspects of media ecology can assist in advancing the field and in making Conventions more interesting and informative. This version is a draft of the paper that was subsequently revised and accepted for the Proceedings of the Media Ecology Convention by the editor for that year.

Mediante profundas y complejas remediaciones a través de su historia, la televisión, en principio una tecnología sin aparente destino, fue transformada hasta afirmarse como el principal medio de información y entretenimiento de las "sociedades de la Segunda Ola" (Toffler). Entre las exitosas tecnologías que contribuyeron a transformar a la televisión destacan: las transmisiones en color; los enlaces satelitales; la incorporación de sistemas VCR; la televisión por cable; la adopción de modalidades de acceso restringido; el desarrollo de la industria de los videojuegos; la introducción del control remoto; la televisión digital y la alta definición (HDTV); y por supuesto Internet, el "medio de comunicación inteligente" (Islas y Gutiérrez, 2000).
En Ser Digital (1996), Nicholas Negroponte afirmó que Internet inevitablemente transformaría a la televisión. Efectivamente, la principal remediación que es posible advertir en la historia de la televisión corre a cargo de Internet. Es posible anticipar que Internet transformará a la televisión hasta convertirla en un medio muy diferente al que hoy en día conocemos. You Tube representa uno de los principales referentes de la nueva televisión posible a través de Internet. Empresas como Mercedes Benz y Audi ya operan canales propios de televisión por Internet.

Turntables and Tropes is the first book to address remix from a communicative perspective, examining its persuasive dimensions by locating its parallels with classical rhetoric. Through identifying, recontextualizing, mashing up, and applying rhetorical tropes to contemporary digital texts and practices, this groundbreaking book presents a new critical vocabulary that scholars and students can use to analyze remix. Building upon scholarship from classical thinkers such as Isocrates, Quintilian, Nāgārjuna, and Cicero and contemporary luminaries like Kenneth Burke, Richard Lanham, and Eduardo Navas, Scott Haden Church shows that an understanding of rhetoric offers innovative ways to make sense of remix culture.

Rising from the Big Bend is what might be the best big idea in the whole state of Texas. Yep, it’s that big!

Bigger than the rocket launches of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Bigger than the football coliseums for the Cowboys, Longhorns, and Aggies. Bigger than any tech dream launched by the hipsters at Apple, Google, or Tesla in Austin. Bigger than the towering 10,000 Year Clock being inserted into a 300-foot deep cave in the Sierra Diablo Mountains near Van Horn. Believe it or not, there is something wondrous and profound happening in the Big Bend, far grander than anything happening in our big cities or on our electronic screens.

Imagine a huge swath of the modern world better integrated into the natural world here on Earth and the cosmos above—an area in which the bright skyglow of our cities is tempered in favor of the radiant starglow of the cosmos. In that difference between skyglow and starglow lies hope for a better tomorrow. That’s why we need to turn our gaze away from our screens, at least for a while, and experience our true place in the universe. We can find it in the Big Bend, site of this profound and beautiful project.

It’s called the Greater Big Bend International Dark Sky Reserve. You’ve probably never heard of it. But, I find this to be an incredibly hopeful project, not only for Texans, but for Americans and the rest of humanity Relax, this is not a political essay. It’s a story about hope for a deeper and richer understanding of our place on Earth and in the universe.

Although the 2017 revival of the #MeToo campaign has received mass media praise, it’s direct contribution to the current social shift fighting for social and political justice has yet to be empirically documented. Did this campaign provide temporary catharsis further inhibiting enactment within the social and political spheres? Understandings of social media campaigns’ role in social action is still limited in the literature. Using Bowers, Ochs, & Jensen (1971) explanations of rhetoric of agitation and control, I analyze news and social media accounts of the #MeToo campaign activity and the possible unfolding of social actions or inactions, including planned and forthcoming public events or campaigns over the next few months. This paper will place #MeToo within the context of feminism rhetoric and socio-political change. This analysis contributes to our understanding of social media’s role in political action and the position of feminist discourse within the public rhetoric to end sexual abuse, assault, and exploitation.

PhD Dissertation, 2008-2011.
This dissertation is a comparative analysis of New Zealand’s and Vancouver Island’s print culture between 1853 and 1862. It utilises the colonial press as a key archive to track the resonance of ideas and arguments across the British Empire at a time when violence in the colonies called imperial authority into question. It demonstrates that in this moment of imperial crisis, humanitarian language remained politically efficacious and widely deployed in both New Zealand and Vancouver Island. This usage occurred in spite of and sometimes because of colonists’ anxiety related to the threat of indigenous violence. The popularity of humanitarianism was also influenced by the press’ symbolic role as an embodiment of public opinion and the British Empire’s status as an agent of Providence. Influenced by Harold Innis and James Carey, this dissertation pays close attention to the mechanics of news transmission, especially how the practice of ‘cut and paste’ journalism reproduced colonial news across the British Empire. Forms of argument mattered just as much as facts in this context.
Through a comparative approach, this dissertation is able to assess the features both common and unique to New Zealand and Vancouver Island, including the effects of their divergent locations within imperial networks. While New Zealand had established press connections with Great Britain and other settler colonies, newspaper editors in Vancouver Island considered themselves on the edge of empire. Indeed, New Zealand colonists’ perceptions of metropolitan surveillance shaped interpretations of the Taranaki war. In contrast, Vancouver Island’s isolation facilitated an interpretive dichotomy. While the colonial press offered pervasive reportage of local Aboriginal violence, Vancouver Island’s boosters provided metropolitan readers with disarming accounts of local Aboriginal peoples and no details of colonists’ anxiety. Coverage of anxiety and violence and the use of humanitarian themes often coalesced, informed by colonial editors’ imagined audiences, colonial executives’ ties to missionary humanitarians, and perceptions of metropolitan control.

The Black Lives Matter movement has inspired the eradication of symbols and icons associated with oppressive systems around the world. Statues are being defaced or taken has sparked heated debates around the world that may be settled by combining some of the terms and ideas of media ecology and general semantics. Media ecology is instrumental for understanding the nature of these media, and general semantics for understanding people's responses to them. The concept of context runs through the debate and there prefaces to them. The author proposes a different way to contextualize them, which she believes has the potential of settling the current heated debate.

This essay explores the changing character of public discourse in the Age of Twitter. Adopting the perspective of media ecology, the essay highlights how Twitter privileges discourse that is simple, impulsive, and uncivil. This effect is demonstrated through a case study of Donald J. Trump's Twitter feed. The essay concludes with a brief reflection on the end times: a post-truth, post-news, President Trump, Twitter-world.

Here, I follow one of the more exciting and under-explored consequences of grounding media as metaphor - the (not so) sudden compatibility of media ecology with the claim that fictional objects are real. This paper explores what ontological repercussions can be brought to bear on McLuhan's long-evolving media concept in light of some contemporary continental theories concerning the reality-fiction divide. While McLuhan's message has resonated with many since the publication of Understanding Media (1964), some recent criticism has challenged this tradition by suggesting that McLuhan's concept of 'media as metaphor' rests on a pluralistic ontology of media forms. In my view, the creative interplay between figure and ground that marks mediums as sites of causal events blurs without effacing the distinction between actuality and possibility and suggests that the constant extension and remediation of media forms that emerge from consciousness plays an active role in perceptual awareness of objective reality. I argue that this alternative approach to media ontology rehabilitates Aristotle's formal cause by extending the concept to include a form of poiesis. McLuhan's media, therefore, signal that media forms achieve a fictional status through an inexhaustible process of mediation as interpretation. It is in this sense that I read McLuhan as a thinker of the new and a philosopher of fiction.

Following Emily Keightley and Anna Reading in their conceptualization of ‘mediated mobilities’, I illuminate useful connections between media ecology and mobilities research and make the case for a combined modal medium theory. Both fields align clearly in their interest in technology and technique, media and modes, and messages and moods. A fruitful starting point in the suggested transdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework is the exploration of the specific medium along with its materialities. In the second step, different kinds of environments and possible choreographies the medium affords ask to be considered. In a broader conceptualization, the term ‘medium’ refers not only to technological entities but also to subjects (tourists), practices (dancing), and places (cities), which likewise prompt different messages and moods. Ideally, research occurs on a synchronous level by following the routes of media and modes across space, and on a diachronous level by exploring the roots of media and modes across time. The objective is to promote a material medium literacy that questions capacities and agencies of forms and materials in their respective contexts.

Este texto comprende seis apartados y la conclusión. En el primero, explicamos qué es la ecología de los medios. En el segundo, señalamos cómo las tecnologías han observado a través de la historia un rol protagónico en la transformación cultural de las sociedades. En el tercero, destacamos que los nuevos medios digitales no únicamente se desempeñan como extensiones de los medios precedentes, además operan como amplificadores. En el cuarto apartado centramos nuestra atención en las remediaciones y las hipermediaciones. En el quinto, destacamos que la nueva ecología digital abre retos y oportunidades a personas, empresas e instituciones. En el sexto apartado presentamos una tipología relativa a la adopción de innovaciones, destacamos la discontinuidad que se presenta en productos innovadores, y concluimos introduciendo el término sabiduría digital, del cual, en buena medida podría depender el devenir de la especie humana en el imaginario de la cuarta revolución industrial.

Este libro plantea un tema de suma actualidad como es la lectura, y particularmente se enfoca en las características que esta asume en las pantallas digitales (computadoras, tablets, smartphones, e-readers). Con un enfoque centrado en la Ecología de los medios, pero nutriéndose de otras disciplinas como la historia de la lectura, la antropología de los lectores, las neurociencias y los estudios del cerebro lector, la teoría del hipertexto y los estudios del software, las interfaces digitales y los pactos de lectura desde una perspectiva semio-cognitiva, entre otras, se propone alimentar el debate sobre cómo se lee en la actualidad. Lejos de las miradas críticas o pesimistas según las cuales se lee mal, poco y superficialmente, este volumen plantea enriquecer ese debate y ofrecer argumentos a favor de las nuevas capacidades que desarrolla el lector en un ecosistema de pantallas y con nuevos hábitos de lectura que tienen a la multitarea como rasgo diferencial. La lectura transmedia, precisamente, se define aquí como un tipo de lectura inclusiva, multimodal, diversa, de todo tipo de textos –escritos, visuales, sonoros, lúdicos- y de soportes, que a su vez se mezcla o hibrida con las prácticas de producción o prosumo del lector. La profundidad que caracterizaba a la lectura continuada en un mismo dispositivo impreso se convierte ahora en una profundidad extensiva a distintas plataformas y pantallas.

This article frames Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si' as papal media ecology, religious communication that invites interpretations using media ecology. First, a media ecological analysis of Laudato Si' articulates concerns about the global, environmental impact of the technocratic paradigm. Second, Martin Heidegger's definition for ge-stell is examined to consider the effects of technology on existence. Third, Heidegger's methods for rejecting ge-stell are compared to Pope Francis' plans for replacing the technocratic paradigm. Pope Francis offers a superior approach because a combined top-down and bottom-up approach in a community committed to social change is more likely to enact a paradigm shift.

Questo testo introduce un ambito di indagine per molti versi ancora inedito in Italia: la media ecology.
Superando la convinzione secondo cui i media sono semplici mezzi o strumenti per comunicare e interagire, l’ecologia dei media propone una visione sistemica in base alla quale questi sono concepiti come veri e propri ambienti, un insieme di forme culturali, tecnologiche e comunicative al cui interno l’uomo si trova a vivere e ad agire. L’ambiente dei media è perciò considerato un ecosistema coeso, aperto e dinamico in cui hanno modo di manifestarsi le tante forme espressive della cultura umana.
Con un approccio sintetico e strutturato, il volume offre un quadro organico dei più autorevoli protagonisti – Mumford, Postman, McLuhan, Bateson, Ellul, per citarne solo alcuni – delle principali scuole di pensiero – New York, Toronto, Chicago – delle discipline coinvolte e dei concetti chiave attraverso cui tracciare una mappa storiografica di questa tradizione intellettuale diffusa nel contesto nordamericano ma radicata anche nell’ambiente culturale europeo.
Una serie di riferimenti antologici, il taglio introduttivo e un ricco apparato bibliografico fanno di questo testo un punto di partenza essenziale per quanti – studenti, studiosi, ma anche non specialisti – vogliano accostarsi a questo nuovo campo di studi.

This paper contributes a digital-aesthetics approach to relevant new media discourse topics concerning the market, power and control, and identity formation by way of discussing the phenomenon of computer-generated imagery (CGI). Specifically, I will examine experimental digital artists who, directly or indirectly, harness imperfection and/or use 'disruptive CGI' aesthetics in their experimental digital art. The artists on whom I will focus on are Alan Warburton, Claudia Hart, and Mike Pelletier. I will argue that through noticeable, disruptive, and non-photorealistic CGI aesthetics, these artists provide (self-)awareness of the medium of the computer, and the generated imagery it helps humans produce. This reflexive awareness confronts viewers with contemporary and future usages and values linked to a) mainstream aesthetics in corporate-driven CGI (i.e. Hollywood, game culture, etc.) and its relation to the political sphere, as well as b) questions inherent to (the possibilities and limitations of) the medium's human-machine relationship to corporeality and environments.