Media Ecology | (((Knowledge Ecology)))

March 18, 2013

The Question as Medium

The philosopher is tasked with the work of responding to a series of complex and evolving questions: What is being? How do we know? What is a good life? Who are we? Such inquiries are so formative in the history of philosophy that gaining a solid grip of their influence on philosophic practice is itself almost tautological: Philosophy is the pursuit (love, etymologically) of these questions, and the emergence of the right questions is in turn the wisdom or love of philosophy itself. In philosophy the role of such deep questioning has always been of central importance.

But there are also smaller questions that are easier to study as they unfold and shape the dynamics of a specific philosophical event. One such event is evidenced by the back and forth between a conference speaker and her audience. The speaker presents her material and patiently awaits a response from her peers. Here an important deconstructive moment occurs when responding to the question. The philosopher must determine what the question being asked does to the content of what she has presented. We find such practices of deconstruction widespread in philosophy. One can find, for example, a Jacques Derrida painstakingly analyzing the conditions within which questions are framed, what is made possible by the question, and what becomes inaccessible by framing inquiry in a certain way. The philosopher can decide whether the question is adequate to her content and proceed to respond based on her assessment.

The question I ask myself when observing this phenomena is how does the question impact the content of what is being said. Much ink has been spilled in twentieth century philosophy over the importance of “paradigms” (Kuhn) or “epistemes” (Foucault). To my mind the paradigm and the episteme provide deeply ecological accounts of human subject formation, and the recursive relationships enacted between human knowledge production, on the one hand, and the evolving plasticity of the human subject, on the other. For Foucault an episteme refers to the historical conditions of possibility within which the knowledge and discourse of a particular epoch is grounded. For Kuhn the paradigm refers to a very particular mode of research questioning enacted to stabilize the puzzle solving practices of “normal science.” These puzzle solving strategies have consequences for how humans and technical instruments are assembled, the goal being to refine the acceptable methods for studying a particular constellation of phenomena.

In the case of both epistemes and paradigms disruption is an always present possibility (“epistemic rupture” to crib a phrase from Gaston Bachelard, or “scientific revolution” to borrow Kuhn’s term). However, when I use the phrase “ecology of knowledge” what I am interested in is less the background conditions within which questions are framed (Foucault’s “historical a priori”) and more with giving an ontological description of the ecological relationships that emerge between the content of a philosophical statement and its encounter with a mode of questioning; or, more deeply: My concern is with the sensitive plasticity of modes of thought to different kinds of knowledges, and how these sensitivities shift during encounters with certain kinds of questions. In this sense the deconstructive moment remains an important aspect of understanding knowledge ecologies; it recovers the background of historical relations that shift in and out of different species of subjectivity.

However, beyond this archeological task, giving a descriptive ontological account of the encounter between knowledges and subjectivities is also central. (Of course there is no actual binary between the “archeological” or “deconstructive” moment and the ecological one. I am drawing a line of convenience to help organize my own thinking.) It is in this sense that I have begun to think about knowledges and questions as mediums of the kind that media ecologists interpret. In other words, just as different kinds of technological assemblages enhance, reverse, retrieve, and obsolesce different experiential possibilities within human organisms and the sensory ecology of a certain social epoch, so to can we study different kinds of questions and knowledges as mediums that reframe the ecological conditions within which human subjectivity is shaped. In fact, given the wide diversity of world views active on the planet today, I believe that giving such an ecologically descriptive account is essential to questions framed under the term “Cosmopolitics.”

A cosmopolitics of knowledge must explore and describe the influence of knowledge ecologies on human subject formation. The human organism, and possibly all organisms, is immersed not just in ecologies of other beings and constructed environments, but also within ecologies of knowledge that play every bit as profound a role in constituting the conditions of a given epoch. In this sense “the question” is an ecological actor capable of either sustaining the activity of the epoch (“normal science”) or of asking a new question, calling forward new modes of thought not yet believed possible (“epistemic rupture”). We should be able to produce an ontologically thick description — a genuinely radical empiricism — that takes into account the ecological relationships between knowledges, knowers, and questioners; and not just in terms of the episteme or paradigm, but in terms of the ongoing ecological signaling between all organisms and species of subjectivity. To the questions-themselves!

8 comments

February 24, 2013

The Aerobiosphere

Newly published research indicates that the sky above our heads is filled with complex living ecologies that contribute to global weather dynamics. In the words of one researcher, this “contributes significantly to the hypothesis that the atmosphere is alive . . . The possibility of microbes being metabolically active in the atmosphere transforms our understanding of global processes.” We’ve seen reports like this before, but freshly published research always brings these exciting ideas back to mind.

The report also reminds me of one of the arguments from my article in Thinking Nature (forthcoming . . . soon?). In that paper I suggest we need a new conception of media ecology expanded to include all organisms, and not just human ones. From this perspective the sky is not a given backdrop upon which evolutionary dynamics unfold, but a recursively active media ecology that is constructed by a series of entangled organisms. Organisms are media ecologists enveloped by the media ecologies of other organisms, and aerobiology is just one exotic example that highlights this point.

What I think is so interesting about this perspective is that it implies that the Earth itself is not just a ground, but also a medium that constrains and conditions the semio-energetic cascade of organismic and ecosystemic development. By re-thinking the Earth as a kind of media my hope is twofold. First, I think the idea can open up the possibility of a more porous and participatory encounter with the Earth as a malleable but constitutive entity that frames the possibility of all human activity. Second, media ecology can highlight the important role played by the material distribution of constructed environments in terms of the enactment of an organism’s worldspace.

The latter point has consequences for how we think about cognitive ethology too. If we think of the Earth as a media ecology, or a series of media ecologies, then we have to think of the enacted worldspace of each organism from a distributed and extended perspective. In other words, if we think of media ecologies as constructed zones that tamper with the sensory ratios and affective sensibilities of organisms, then we are obliged to conclude that each organism’s “ecology of mind” is extended beyond the sensory apparatus of the physical organism. It’s a sort of strange but striking image: The Earth fluoresces with the distributed cognition of billions of organisms and the flashing perceptual zones of a diverse anarchy of media ecologies of mind.

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January 18, 2013

Evolving Ecological Media Cultures

What a great title. Adrian can tell you more about the initiative here.

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November 4, 2012

Urban Media Ecologies

[Image: Richard Hardy]

Recently I have been reaching out to various academic communities to gather sources on what a media ecology of the city would like in the twenty-first century.

While most of my posts on Knowledge Ecology have to do with various branches of continental and speculative philosophy I am not at all ignorant of the fact much of the important work in this area is coming from sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and political or urban ecologists; for this reason I have tried to reach out to them in particular (much thanks is due to the EANTH listserv, which I highly recommend to interested readers).

Thinking the city is necessarily a transdisciplinary endeavor and I would love to hear what folks in other disciplines or branches of philosophy have to say about centering the city as an object of investigation (are analytic philosophers working on new frameworks for exploring human-city dynamics from an ecological perspective? — truth be told I have no idea but would love to find out).

I have a short list of important texts that have been recommended to me from the social science community which I am posting as an online PDF incase anyone else is interested in following along HERE.

Additions and further suggestions are welcome.

2 comments

September 18, 2012

City and Mind

[Photo: Ward Roberts]

The city takes us over. More than an environment it penetrates us; more than a fixed enclosure it shifts with our every behavior. The city, like a giant octopus swimming in the deep, swallows us whole and begins to shape us along its grooves and edges. It swims through the surrounding boundaries thrashing into rock, water, and sand. So much steel and glass metabolizes in our minds and shades the contours of our perceptions. It assigns to us new notions of speed, velocity, and distance; we expand along its metallic curves moving upwards into the condensing droplets of clouds. Its infrastructure percolates with the flow of oil, gas, and concrete; its hum sounds like cancer; its electronic lights glow like a million terrestrial stars. The city is vast, but it rests on the edge of continents like a small nebula floating in deep space.

We breathe the city air and its chemical refuse becomes our own. We inhale its chemistry; its molecules become us as our organic fibers trail through its rusty corridors; a wandering carnival of automobiles and spent fuel spill into the street. What is city and what is human is not clear—the threshold between parasite and symbiont is crossed ten thousand times a day, both recklessly and intentionally. But it’s not just the human that is affected by cities, even though it was humans who built them. The city is enmeshed in larger ecologies—perhaps extending like the barnacles on some fertile archipelago or small rocky island. But the city is itself an ecology; an ecology of communication systems, power grids, bridges, terminals, data, and screens. All of these are part of the human ecology of perception and material well-being. To be sure, the city is also a multispecies ecology of organisms that inhabit its causeways and hide within its industrial undergrowth.

Lewis Mumford tells us, “The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind” (CoC p. 5). Surely, the city emerges from the molten core of that rumbling blue diamond we call earth; cities are geological facts. But it’s a troublesome statement: the city is a fact of nature. Troubling because cities are centers of violence and exploitation, of excommunicated laborers and strung out addicts. Surely things can be otherwise. In the awareness of other possible worlds, there is nothing inevitable about the city’s social strata. Here the idea of nature is a specter that is, “getting in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art” (EWN p. 1). Nature is an indefinable emptiness, everything and nothing all at once.

A city is haunted by its comparison with this indefinable nature. Within the idea of nature the city is caught in never ending battles between the sacred and the profane. Either the city is the city on the hill—a beacon of a utopian future that turns a blind eye to its oppression and pollution—or, conversely, the city is the city of the damned—something out of balance with the surrounding landscapes of trees, oceans, and hills. In both of these senses “nature hovers over things like a ghost” (EWN p. 14) and prevents a more radically ecological vision from coming through. To Mumford we might then say that, yes, the city is a fact, but it is a fact of the earth and not a fact of nature, and we must learn to love the city’s most forgotten strata, its most unnatural temperaments, in order to understand what ecology means for the human mind.

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May 6, 2012

Figure/Ground Interviews Eric McLuhan (Updated: Vote for Figure/Ground Communications)

HERE.

Eric McLuhan discusses coining the term “media ecology,” a phrase I believed was attributable to Neil Postman. As recently as yesterday I stated that Neil Postman created the term, but this seems incorrect as he can only be credited for popularizing it. There is also a great discussion on why the McLuhans’ tetrad can only be applied to humans, a position I still don’t understand. In my own work I’ve expanded media ecology (and by extension elements of the tetrad) to apply to all organisms (and, like Graham Harman, to all entities; though my work in ecology tends to have me emphasizing living critters more often than not). If you haven’t checked out the Figure/Ground series yet, I highly recommend spending some time exploring the excellent work Laureano Ralon has put together over there.

[Update: A note from Laureano Ralon:

Thanks for posting this! Figure/Ground Communication is competing at Canada’s West Coast Social Media Awards. We need your support to continue growing. Casting your vote takes 5 seconds and no personal information is needed from you. Simply click on each of the links below and select Figure/Ground Communication.

http://westcoastsocialmediaawards.com/voting/community-builder-award/

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You can vote once a day until May 13th.

Your support is greatly appreciated!

I encourage interested readers to head on over and give your support!]

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May 2, 2012

Speculation and Ecology: Some Notes for Friday’s Talk (updated)

Ecology is typically defined as the study of relationships between organisms and environments, and the relationships between organisms to one another. This essay suggests another way forward: a re-visioning of ecology in the context of Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative philosophy. By thinking ecology with Whitehead we will be able to demonstrate a simple and surprising truth: all relations of any kind—be they between sea anemones and coral reefs or between philosophers and the world—are ecological in nature. By generalizing the definition of ecology to include relations of any kind, we expand our notions of what ecology is all about, and our ability to enact a cosmopolitics—a planetary thought for a planetary ecology—is greatly enhanced. But what, we might ask, does speculative philosophy have to do with ecology? Are we not mixing the empirical world of the natural sciences with the subjective world of a philosopher’s fantasy? I’m going to suggest that in order to actually understand the meaning of ecology—and in particular the possibility of an ecological ethics—we have to speculate, using the best of our sciences and the best of our imagination to do so.

Read the rest of this entry »

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May 1, 2012

Matter, Media, and Mind: Essay Complete

It has been a good week for finishing up writing projects. I just completed a new essay entitled “Matter, Media, and Mind: A Threefold Approach To Ecologies.” I’m attaching the full pdf HERE. Many of the ideas presented in this paper will be the focus of a talk I am giving at the California Institute of Integral Studies this Friday, as part of their annual founder’s symposium. In the spirit of Whitehead’s return via various ecological philosophies, I hope that this essay can go some ways to re-visioning what ecology means for us in the twenty-first century. Here’s an excerpt from the portion on “Knowledge Ecologies” (from which this blog gets its name):

Knowledge ecologies have important implications for how we think about ideas. In the world of human knowledge, the idea acts as a cosmogram; an actor that is part of its surrounding terrain, an abstraction that is part of the territory it describes, exerting a pull on the world it tries to map. Ideas are things that, once generated by the thinker, immediately gain their own autonomy and ability to re-arrange other ideas. Plainly stated, ideas exist in the world in the same way as any other ecological actor; ideas are a part of the actuality of experience and are therefore amenable to an ecological interpretation. When mediated through the appropriate media ecologies, ideas can then impact the physical form of any other entity within their reach. As an abstraction, the idea is also a cryptogram, concealing certain features of the terrain it helps to enact. The contrast between the revealing and concealing character of the idea speaks to the fact that no single mode of thought has a monopoly on the real; rather, every idea is partial and relative to its ecology, capable only of exposing certain features of a more complex landscape. In this way knowledge ecology has a complex relationship to media ecology since both are actively foregrounding and backgrounding differed aspects of a more complex reality.

March 26, 2012

More Thoughts on Embodied/Extended Minds

In response to my previous post, blog aficionado dmf linked to THIS very interesting talk which includes some criticisms of the extended/embodied mind hypothesis from philosopher of mind Robert Rupert. Below is an extended version of my initial response.

As I’m listening to Robert Rupert I hear him saying that, as far as defining what counts as a cognitive process goes, we should limit ourselves to that which is central to all cognitive processes (i.e., the brain inside your skull) rather than include the multiplicity of objects that might become participant in some specific cognitive act (i.e., using a pen and paper to perform some mental operation).

But by suggesting that we limit cognition to only its core processes (in the brain) we fail at understanding how that brain is already constituted by a variety of environmental factors. So, for example, Rupert discusses the interest extended mind theorists have had with the role literacy plays in the constitution of new forms of consciousness (citing the widely-held hypothesis that literate societies are in some substantial way different from pre-literate societies). If I’m hearing him right, Rupert suggests that this historical analysis is all well and good, but his interest is in how the brain is constituted internally here and now, and not as it changes as part of some historical trend. For Rupert, what is essential to the brain’s cognitive functioning doesn’t change in any significant way when brains are shifted across contexts (i.e., they tend to act the same regardless of environment).

If this is a correct reading of Rupert’s analysis, then I would say my difference with him is that I take environmental factors in cognitive activity to be influential not only at the moment of use, but as enduring features of a media-rich cognitive landscape that, because of the nature of media environments, will have an increasing impact on the minds of the people inhabiting those environments (which will tend towards a recursive increase generated by the way different media ecologies enact different sensory modalities). In this sense I don’t think we can study cognitive organization outside of the media contexts in which it is being studied, even if there are certain physical parameters brains require to operate transversally across all media environments. This doesn’t mean that I think ion channels obey different laws in sixth century China than in twenty-first century San Francisco, it means that I think the globally enacted world that appears for an observer is very sensitive to the conditions of media environments and this matters when talking about what “cognition” is.

Now, everything that I have said above is for the most part already figured in to both the enactivist paradigm and media ecology more generally. What I am interested in doing is adding a third ecological dimension to the equation: if enactivism corresponds to the material sensory-couplings of organisms and their environments; and media ecologies refer to the modes by which organisms extend those sensory couplings; then a knowledge ecology explores the ways in which an organism’s psyche is extended or transformed through the use of different concepts, ideas, ideologies, or paradigms. Thus in much the same way that, “media ecology is the study of media as environment” I would forward that knowledge ecology is the study of knowledge or mind as environment. There would then be three integral ecologies of matter, media, and mind; each folding, shaping, and re-constructing one another in increasingly subtle ways. I have come to think of this schema as parallel to Whitehead’s threefold account of the actual occasion (subject, datum, and subjective form in shorthand). In this sense my little model isn’t really a theory of cognition so much as it is a threefold of account of relations and causality based in ecological thinking; where cognition is interpreted from a much broader, cosmological perspective. Stay tuned.

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August 14, 2011

Media Ecology of Protest Pt. 2

It seems a hacker group has not taken kindly to the SFPD’s decision to shut down cell service yesterday (see the below post). Check out the developments HERE.

2 comments

August 13, 2011

Media Ecology of Protest (Updated)

I just came across THIS article about action the SFPD took to snuff out cell phone signals in anticipation of a protest over the shooting of a man shot by BART police last month (this happened last year as well, a very controversial issue in the bay area). What strikes me here is that this was done prior to any demonstrations actually taking place, and was enacted as a measure to prevent organizers from being able to coordinate their assembly.

I’m also struck by the use of media in the recent UK protests- on both sides of the episode. On the one hand, rioters and protesters were using their cell phones to coordinate their movements (which from news reports seemed to based in vulgar acts of violence in addition to genuine political activism. THIS article details how the protests outside London led to the burning of the UK’s largest indie record distributor- my heart goes out to any artists, and indeed, everyone else, who is suffering from this Read the rest of this entry »

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August 5, 2011

SF Semiosis: Symbolic Geostrata and Media Ecology (Updated)

Update: I received an email from a graffiti writer who read this post. I thought his comments were worth repeating here, it seems that we largely agree on the issues presented below:

Vandalism and counter-culture is the wild animal stalking the village. The folks at upper-playground want so badly to tame it and turn it into the ox that plows the field. But just as soon as you can domesticate a particular form the footsteps of another blood thirsty beast are heard outside your bedroom window. I agree that a major goal of graffiti may be to show how private public space has become (activism), but also the core of graffiti is vandalism. Graffiti doesn’t exist unless rooted in vandalism, the illest letters are just art if painted in a gallery. Graffiti is for many a simple vehicle to expel the surplus of contempt. Like a visual nervous tick. Thusly untamable, void of conscious reason. I wonder if the Read the rest of this entry »

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July 31, 2011

Robbing the JSTOR: Theft or Activism?

HT Kluth Von Reuter. Some very interesting developments going on in the hacking/file sharing world. Below, a quote from the THIS article, with some added commentary from THIS one.

Aaron Swartz, a Cambridge web entrepreneur and political activist who has lobbied for the free flow of information on the Internet, was charged in federal court with hacking into a subscription-based archive system at MIT and stealing more than 4 million articles, including scientific and academic journals.

This is definitely a debate worth having: how do we wager the necessity of free access to information against the need to keep the publishing industry alive? Clearly, print media is in a whole lot of trouble, with the only solution presenting itself seeming to be a migration of print to a totally electronic world of online, open access media. I say total migration, but I suspect myself and other will always buy books- Read the rest of this entry »

8 comments

June 23, 2011

Mediacology on Integral Ecology

Antonio Lopez leads us through chapters 5 and 6. I’ve been particularly looking forward to a media theorist’s perspective on integral ecology and Antonio’s post delivers. Check it out over HERE. I’ll be up in the next few days with my own response.

May 13, 2011

Three Ecologies and the Composition of Space

I’ve been revisiting Eric and Marshall Mcluhan’s Laws of Media: The New Science. Its my first return to the work since I steeped myself in all things media ecology last summer. In particular, I’ve found myself gripped by the Mcluhan’s commentary on what they call “Post-Euclidean Acoustic Space,” a meditation on the construction of space as a concept. Space, for media ecologists like the Mcluhans is not a given artifact of existence, but is rather a particular abstraction, or way of organizing human experience, that emerges in Greece (and probably elsewhere too) as the result of both the development of alphabetic language, and later by a geometrical conception of reality as extended space, exemplified by Descartes’ formulation that “brought the physical world, as an abstract machine, into line with geometrical space” (p. 27).

In the early 20th century, it seemed that scientists would have to look back upon history and explore how it is that “space” and “reality” became synonymous concepts, since it appeared that Einstein et al had greatly complexified the understanding of both space and time. The McLuhan’s write: “When the consonant was invented as a meaningless abstraction, vision detached itself from the other senses and visual space began to form” (p. 13), This view of human experience as centered on visual perception, which separated out the integrative functioning of other senses such as hearing and tactility, coupled with the conceptual understanding of “space” as a literal ontological structure, rather than as an abstract construction of human consciousness, is precisely what led to the difficulties, and counterintuitive nature of understanding the curved and enfolded quality of Einstein’s then emerging cosmology.

Space, it seemed from a post-Einsteinian perspective, was an untenable hypothesis. What does this mean exactly? That space itself is historically situated and constructed? That “reality” is a construct of human cultures and societies? Yes and no I think are both good answers. Yes, because it seems clear that the idea of “space” as an absolute is unnecessary since, if we follow the Mcluhan’s assessment (and others such as Walter Ong or Eric Havelock), space appears to have emerged as a concept at a particular moment in history and is contingent upon the creation of certain media ecologies (the alphabet, writing and geometry in this case). No, because to reduce reality to human interpretations of it precisely misses the point of what is so interesting about media ecology, namely the role nonhuman artifacts and environments play in the construction of “the real.” Media ecology is about diverse interactions and compositions of perspectives and mediums, not just anthropocentric subjectivities.

Read the rest of this entry »

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April 6, 2011

Benjamin- Blogger, Media Ecologist

I submit for your approval two proofs that Walter Benjamin was both a blogger and a media ecologist.

I find the first one particularly useful in tackling Ray Brassier’s comment “I don’t believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate.” Perhaps he is right to some extent, but I still think Benjamin has a point (see exhibit A below). And I like exhibit B because it speaks directly to the medium and language of things, which as I have previously argued, is essential in the consideration of any debate about online forums.

Also, check out the last post on the Alan Badiou/Jean-Luc Nancy debate- another good example of what Benjamin is speaking to, as well as a good reason to defend the media ecology of blogging.

Both quotes are from Benjamin’s One Way Street.

Exhibit A:

Filling Station

The construction of life is at present in the power far more of facts than of convictions, and of such facts as have scarcely ever become the basis of convictions. Under the circumstances, true literary activity cannot aspire to take place within a literary framework; this is, rather, the habitual expression of sterility.

Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book—in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment.

Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.

Exhibit B:

On Language as Such and on the Language of Man

Every expression of human mental life can be understood as a kind of language, and this understanding, in the manner of a true method, everywhere raises new questions. It is possible to talk about a language of music and of sculpture, about a language of justice that has nothing directly to do with those in which German or English legal documents are couched, about a language of technology that is not the specialized language of the technicians. Language in such contexts means the tendency inherent in the subjects concerned- technology, art, justice, or religion- toward the communication of mental meanings. To sum up: all communication of mental meanings is language, communication in words being only a particular case of human language and of the justice, poetry, or whatever underlying it or founded on it. The existence of language, however is not only coextensive with all the areas of human mental expression in which language is always in one sense or another inherent, but with absolutely everything. There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of all to communicate their mental meanings. The use of the word “language” is in no way metaphorical.

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March 22, 2011

Media Ecology and Blogging Part 3

I have been trying to contemplate more adequately this statement from Levi Bryant’s response to my earlier posts (part 1 and part 2). Bryant wrote:

Journals are able to maintain strict disciplinary boundaries and tend only to be read by specialists in a particular field. With blogging it is different. The philosopher writes a blog post and suddenly the artist, comedian, ethnographer, geographer, mathematician, businessperson, activist, housewife, linguist, rhetorician, computer programmer, etc., speaks up. You are no longer addressed to others that have undergone the same process of academic subjectivization as you, but now are forced to encounter a variety of different forms of thought, knowledge-production, and life. This significantly diminishes the narcissistic pretensions that any and every discipline harbors with respect to itself. Boundaries are blurred and something new tends to emerge.

Since even before I was a grad student I was very interested in transdisciplinary research projects, and have long felt that academic specialization had reached its peak and had entered a deficient phase that was stifling the kind of knowledge production that a politically globalized, economically networked and ecologically endangered planetary society requires. Transdisciplinary research differs from inter or multidisciplinary research in that it seeks to blur distinctions between research projects more thoroughly, engaging research questions at meta-paradigmatic scales.

As such, transdisciplinary research raises a variety of epistemological problems about the nature of human perception vis-a-vis worldviews and their accompanying research models. Thomas Kuhn did to scientific research programs what Freud and the gestalt psychologists of the 20th century did to the human psyche. Kuhn destabilized our sense of control in perceiving a truly “objective” image of an independent and unified world that existed “out there.” Transdisciplinary research is a late response to the coming to consciousness of the role paradigms play in even basic aspects of human perception.

And yet, transdisciplinary research alone does not seem up to the task of matching the incredible amount of diverse specialization happening at the upper levels of the academy (I am not against specialization by the way, but it does need a counterpart through a more integrative model of knowledge production). Perhaps what we need then is not just a new approach to organizing knowledge in the academy but rather a whole new medium of communication.

In short the response to academic specialization that fragments and distorts a more gestalt image of any given situation (and often requires the tyranny of one program over another) lies not only in integrative research, but in the construction of a whole new ecological environment where interactions can occur on dimensions not possible in print. Thus we are dealing with an emergent ecological context that is public, democratic and, just by nature of the medium, breaks down the esotericism of late 20th century disciplinary specialization.

In the end I think this is what blogging will come to (at least for the academically oriented). Its not there yet but I think blogging is so new that (as Harman also pointed out), like an ecosystem far from its climax state, the media ecology developing online still needs to pass through several successive phases of disorder and re-organization before it can enter a phase of “normalcy.” In this regard knowledge and media ecologies seem to operate in ways similar to Kuhn’s understanding of the difference between “normal” and “extraordinary” science (I prefer the newer term “postnormal“).

We are in a postnormal phase with regards to the development of new media ecologies and the results are, at this point, open ended.

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March 20, 2011

Media Ecology and Blogging Part 2

After some quick responses from Graham Harman and Timothy Morton on my recent post, and a slightly longer one from Levi Bryant, I have few comments to add that have occurred to me in response. In my last post I stated that blogging and traditional modes of publishing are different as ecological mediums and therefore we shouldn’t be troubled by their relationship since they are in fact not trying to accomplish the same thing (nor can they). In Morton’s post he pointed to the important point: “Why else put [blogging] down? It wouldn’t be a threat if it was totally different.” Agreed.

There are obvious similarities between blogging and academic writing (especially if your blog is geared primarily to text content as opposed to video or images). The formulation, the structure, the rhetoric- all of these can be the same whether one is writing a blog or an academic paper. Mcluhan pointed out that advances in technology tend to swallow and contain the previous medium, whilst adding new dimensions. Thus the oral speech of radio is included in the technology of TV, whilst TV adds the dimension of moving images. Blogging is the same. Text? Check. Images? Check. Video? Check.

However, technology does not proceed by simply expanding into greater spheres of inclusion, the expansion is always one of a branching particularity, not an enlarging system of containers- technology is not a series of russian dolls. The critics of blogging point to what is lost in the translation of academic content from papers to blogs. Neil Postman himself felt that we ought to return to a more literate culture (for him literary culture was at its most ascendent during the 18th and 19th century), arguing that television as a medium is incapable of producing political discourse regardless of the quality of the television programing. I think we are in a similar position with blogging today, and perhaps the burdens and benefits are not equally distributed.

Morton, Harman and Bryant are in a completely different position than I, and I am not ignorant of this fact. With no publications yet (though I do have an announcement to make about this- stay tuned!) I have nothing to lose by throwing my works out on the internet, and I think it absolutely proves my point that blogging is worth it considering that three of the people who’s works I use regularly were able to respond to my sentiments (much appreciated everyone, really interested to here your opinions).

Blogging is not better or worse than publishing, it is something different, though with the caveat that technology (as we have just noted) tends to include various elements of its previous incarnations creating the illusion that the new medium is just an extended version of the old.

Ok, last point. Is blogging a threat to academia because it exponentiates the downward spiral of the publishing industry? I don’t think so. I cannot speak for my entire generation, but I still buy books all of the time and as a matter of fact many of those purchases come as a direct result of things I hear from blogs that I follow in addition to the traditional outlets. I think the blogging/publishing relationship is mutually enhancing- nothing to fear here folks! If you write your own blog, or just follow them, this is in no way a substitute for actually reading the material that these people put out and I think most of my peers are aware of this.

Something like a crash course in media ecology seems necessary for our times.

8 comments

March 20, 2011

Media Ecology and Blogging

(part 2 is here)

I’m throwing in my two cents here on the blogging vs academic publishing debate that seems to emerge every couple of weeks. I don’t see how anyone could tackle this question without studying the insights of media ecology (Check out MEA here).

Media ecology is the study of media as environments. I have written about this at more length before. By focusing on the medium of communication as well as its message (for there can be no absolute distinction between messenger and information) the media ecologist helps us think through debates such as the ones that frequent the world of internet blogs, namely the troublesome question: is blogging an improvement over traditional academic publications or a sign that we are degenerating into a further levels of inarticulate discourse? Neil Postman has one of the best overviews of the field:

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.

It structures what we can see and say and, therefore, do.

It assigns roles to us and insists on our playing them.

It specifies what we are permitted to do and what we are not. Sometimes, as in the case of a courtroom, or classroom, or business office, the specifications are explicit and formal.

In the case of media environments (e.g., books, radio, film, television, etc.), the specifications are more often implicit and informal, half concealed by our assumption that what we are dealing with is not an environment but merely a machine.

Perhaps because I am part of a younger generation that grew up with the internet (I first logged on when I was 10 or 11), I find this question to be uninteresting. It is of course valuable to consider the greater trajectory of academic discourse in terms of its quality and depth of insight (not to mention its overall applicability), but to compare a blogging medium with the written medium of academic publishing is like asking whether an alpine meadow is better than a grassland savannah. They are different environments, each with different ecological effects on the human sensorium. For the media ecologists conscious experience is in part always rearranged by our engagements with different media which, depending on the format, emphasize different sensory modalities, a different coordination of brain activity and a variety of different infrastructural modes of organization.

So to all those who think blogging is somehow a degenerate form of academic discourse, your missing the point. Surely we cannot replace the journal article with a 200 word quip about the difference Whiteheadian actual occasions and Harmanian objects, but the two media do compliment each other nicely. The fact that I can write a short piece about my current interests, and thereby connect with numerous other individuals who can help me think that topic more critically is money in the bank for a young writer.

This is another reason why I think Graham Harman is working with the right mix: he gets this fairly simple point, and probably wouldn’t make a bad media ecologist himself. I quote him (with some omissions) on a recent post:

In general, I would tend to agree with those who claim that the blogosphere is not yet the right place for fully worked-out philosophical arguments. Or at least I find it hard to do that myself, and thus tend to put most of my energy into traditional publications…

And the medium is still young. Even better things will happen here than what has already happened: the creation of a community of rapid exchange of ideas and dissemination of information…

I’m probably too old ever to pull it off by now (I’ll probably keep writing in traditional publication genres forever, just as some people keep on using typewriters), but many of my readers are young and fresh enough that they can adapt to several futures still to come…

But maybe I am missing the point and some of these anti-blogging academics are really just afraid they are gonna get scooped by a twenty-something without a PhD…

10 comments

Tag: Media Ecology

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