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The Tenth Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association
Convention Coordinators:
If, as Walter Ong suggests, technologies of communication and information affect noetic economies (structures of thought); and if noetic economies have to do with what it means to be human; it seems important to consider how the spoken and the mediated word and image contribute to the human soul – or to the sacred. How have technologies and the larger media world altered our experiences of the sacred?
THURSDAY, JUNE 18, 2009
10 am - 5 pm Registration and check-in
- Housing: Reinert Hall Service Desk, Conference: Student Center
2:45 - 4:00 pm Panel Sessions
1A: The Renaissance of Walter J. Ong, S.J., I
- Abigail Lambke: The Curious Reader and the Reptile Critic: Fielding's Prefaces in Tom Jones
- Jonathan Lux: Milton's Prolusions: Revising the the Classical Oration
- Deborah Davis Schuey: Kitchen Wisdom: Early Modern Recipe and Remedy Books
- Thomas M.Walsh: Orality, Ramism, and Ong's Milton
1B: Mediated Campaigns: Perspectives on Televised Political Advertising
Chair: Mark Glantz
This panel identifies American political campaigns as unique ecological systems in which the media has a vital role. According to Lynda Lee Kaid, "political advertising has evolved into the dominant form of communication between candidates and voters in the United States". In an effort to better understand how televised political campaign messages shape, and are shaped by, our democratic processes, this panel seeks to identify, interpret, and evaluate recurring features and strategies of political campaign spots. Such an approach appreciates the unique political, social, and discursive constraints that contribute to the production of particular types of mediated campaign messages. Each strategy or genre of campaign advertisement identified here will be understood for the rhetorical and psychological needs it fulfills for candidates, parties, and voters and how it fits among campaign messages in other media. Both humanistic and social scientific perspectives are represented here. Ultimately, the panel contributes to ongoing discussions regarding the relationship between political campaigning's most prominent medium and the nature of our democratic system of government.
- Corey B. Davis: OK, You've convinced me--Obama is scary. Now what? Analyzing the role of efficacy in political campaign fear appeals.
- Jeffrey Delbert: Political Advertisements and Burke's Tragic Frame
- Mark Glantz: "Which Way Will He Blow Next?": The Wind Metaphor in Televised Political Campaign Advertising
- Darin J. Gully: The Greatest Hits Collection Featuring Your Favorite Political Candidates: Analyzing the Role of Music in Political Advertising
- J. Scott Smith: Voters' Reactions to Negative Television Ads
4:15 - 5:30 pm Panel Sessions
2A: Noetic Spaces, Noetic Events: Media Interactions
Chair: Jeffrey Rice
Walter Ong frames the noetic as that which organizes experience in a "permanently memorable form." While Ong argued that print culture diminishes the need for noetic structures, we could say that the digital has re-extended the noetic as an organizational tool. If anything, certain aspects of the noetic (feeling, sensation, intuition) have become more pronounced than ever. This panel will examine spatial media interactions from the position of the noetic.
- Speaker 1: Again, or Against, the Valley
- Speaker 2: Plato Comes to Missouri
- Speaker 3: In Media Space, Everyone Can You Scream . . . And Scream . . . And Scream . . .
2B: Mobile Media Devices
- Jason Kalin: Toward a Rhetoric of Hybrid-Space Walking
- Matthew Killmeier: Mobile Space-Binding Media: Automotive Radio and Innis' Communications Theory of History
- Carlos Scolari: mCommunication: the Emergence of Mobile Communication Within the Media Ecosystem
- Nathan Taylor: Personal Audio Manipulation Technology: Control, Interiority, and Cross-modal Interaction
2C: Media Ecology and Political Communication
- Mark Fideli: Contextual Dexterity, Generational Politics, and the 2008 Presidential Election
- Yulia Golobokova: Russia between literacy and orality: Democratization and Media Ecology in the Electronic Age
- Brett Lyszak: Kill Your Television: Toward a Definition and Purpose of Medium Activism
- Ian Reilly: Political Satire and the (Re)Articulation of Public Discourse
- Pier Marton: Holocaust Education in 1,000 years
5:45 - 7:00 pm Plenary Speaker
Eric McLuhan
7 :00 pm dinner/reception
FRIDAY, JUNE 19
9:00 - 10:15 am Panel Sessions
3A: On-Line Practices
- Adriana Braga: Shop Windows and Hiding Places on the Web: Public versus Private Sphere
- Rohit Chopra: New Media Forms as Global 'Structures of Feeling': the Global Limits and License of the Internet and World Wide Web
- Dong-Hoo Lee: Online Self-Disclosure and the Fluid Boundaries of Privacy
- James Rennie: Borrowed Artifacts, Embodied Pleasures: Tactility and Web 2.0
- Davis Foulger: Structurated Cues: Non-Verbal Communication and Online Media
3B: The Renaissance of Walter J. Ong, S.J., II
- Lauren G.Coker: "Bizarre Figures" and Oral Residue: The Hybrid Monstrosity of Grotesque Bodies in Early Modern Texts
- David H. Cormier: The Metaphor and Metonymy of the Book in Areopagitica: "is" "as" and "not absolutely"
- Thomas M. Dieckmann: "'The right reward of an evil-tongued schelm:' The Rhapsodic Weaving of Oral Rhetoric and Residue and the Printed Word in in Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Leicester"
- Corrine E. Hinton: In Praise of Progymnasmata: Aphthonius in Renaissance England
3C: Understanding the New Digital Ecology
- Fernando Gutiérrez: From Electrical to Digital: An Overview of the New Media Ecology
- Octavio Islas: Beyond the Einstein Generation
- Jorge Alberto Hidalgo: Explorations from My Social Media Generation
- Jerónimo Rivera: Citizens of a Media Fishtank
3D: Language and Media
Chair: John Miles Foley
- Sarah Zurhellen: Code-Switching: SMS Messaging and Language Innovation
- Peter Ramey: 'Now We Must Praise [ ]': Apposition and Interchange in Caedmon's Hymn
- Zaid Mahir: Consecrating the Intangible: Our 'Modern' Shame
10:30 - 11:45 am Plenary Session Speaker
John Miles Foley: The Ideology of Text
11:45 am - 1:15 pm Lunch
1:15 - 2:30 pm Panel Sessions
4A: Literary, Historical, and Academic Places
- Matt Thomas: Does Media Ecology Have Anything to Teach American Studies and Vice Versa?
- Tony Tremblay: New Brunswick, Northrop Frye, and the Shifting Ecology of the Idea of Place
- Ronald Zboray and Mary: Sensorium, Secondary Orality, and Antebellum US Print Culture; The Transcendentalist Case
- Tom Zlatic: Telegraphy and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Melville's "Donelson"
4B: Media Ecology, Health, and the Human Psyche
- Dave Curtis: Beyond Behavioralism: Media Ecology and a Lifespan Approach to Autism
- Barry Liss: Playing with the Language of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
- Mary Purcell: Global Pillage: Internet as Medium Facilitating Inevitable Return to Dionysian Nature?
- David Waters: But They Say More is Better: How the Media Environment Makes it Difficult to Prevent Cancer and Promote Health in a U-Shaped World
4C: Orality and Literacy: New Directions and New Challenges
Chair: Brian Cogan
- Brian Cogan: The Irish American Press as an Agent of Change
- Jean-François Vallée: Paradoxes of Orality and Literacy: The Curious Case of the Renaissance Dialogue
- Donna Flayhan: Emotional Intelligence: Re-Merging Primal and Primary Oral Ways of Knowing in our Social Media Embedded Lives
- Frank X. Dance: The Biological Roots of Human Orality
4D: Still Amused? Student Reflections on Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death
Chair: Gerald Erion
Respondent: Lance Strate
In his "Introduction" to the 20th Anniversary Edition of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, Andrew Postman asks whether his father's book remains relevant to today's college students. To address this question, we propose a special 75-minute panel session of undergraduate papers selected from recent Postman-themed honors seminars at Medaille College in Buffalo, NY.
- Rocco Zambito, Jr.: Disarming the Threat to Media Consciousness: Postman's Enduring Lessons for College Students
- Tara MacAuley: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Lost Relevance? The Tradeoffs of Entertainment
- Shawn Arrajj: Postman's Lasting Significance in the Age of the Internet
2:45 - 4:00 pm Panel Sessions
5A: Media Ecology and Religion
- Michael Giobbe: How Wide and How Long, How High and How Deep: The Role of Media Ecology in Church History
- Marinus Iwuchukwu: Human, Media, and Cultural Developments in Walter Ong's Dialogic Openness and their Interreligious Dialogic Relevance in Religious Pluralist Societies
- Steve Reagles: The Numinous Visual Power of Orality: An Ongian Critique of Contemporary Homiletic
- Read Schuchardt and Brett Robinson: Fingertext Rosary: How to Leave the Catholic Church Using only your Cell Phone
5B: Oral Spaces, Oral Practices
- Time Barrow: Digital Orality and Online Video Conversation: Simulating Synchronicity and Preserving Humanness
- Vincente Berdayes: Numbers in Oral Societies
- Jerry Harp: Virtual Discursive Spaces: From Orality to the Internet
- Bob Logan: What is Information?: Why is It Relativistic and What is Its Relationship to Materiality, Meaning and Organization
5C: Issues in Large Project Planning and Management: Teaching and Learning with Technology
This roundtable discussion will cover the basics of project management from project definition to project review. Topics such as funding, budget controls, risk management, strategic planning, software tools, and related Internet resources will be discussed. Each participant will address their experiences with the tools that benefit research, teaching and learning in various areas of media ecology. Topics include computer mediated communication, digital application development and exploitation, and the uses of collaborative tools. Join these participants in discussion and share your own experiences in large project planning and management.
Participants: Mary Ann Allison, Mark Lipton, Kim Rose
5D: Drugs as Media, Media as Drugs: pharmacological approaches to understanding our physical, social, and symbolic environments
Chair: Robert MacDougall, Curry College
"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 (sometimes, as in the case of a courtroom, or classroom, or business office, the specifications are quite 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" (Neil Postman, "The Reformed English Curriculum." in A.C. Eurich, ed., High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education, 1970).Postman (1970) offers a sense of what it means to live in media, what it is like to "inhabit" spaces, places and systems as environments. Taking seriously the idea that media are environmental and therefore structure what people can see, say and do, we should also consider the ways we "inhabit" drugs, and the extent to which various pharmaceuticals function as constitutive environments for the people who use them. Like Postman's media, a host of sexual dysfunction, attention deficit, anti-depressant and anti-anxiety drugs also seem to prompt "certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving." Media and drugs can thus both be conceived as communicative tools that extend and/or inhibit physical, social and symbolic experience--our ways of seeing and being in the world--but how, and why, and in what contexts? This panel adopts a "field view" (McLuhan, 1967) or systems-theoretic approach to understanding our media use as a kind of drug use, and vise-versa.
Respondent: Lance Strate, Fordham University
- Ronan Hallowell: Altered States, Altered Traits, Altered Fates: Toward a Media Ecological Psychopharmacology
- Val Peterson: Sex, Drugs, and Media Ecology
- D. Travers Scott: Sick Users, Interference, and Media as Sensory Inhibition
- Robert MacDougall: Perceptual Amplifiers and Inhibitors, Metamental Loops, and Surrogate Situations: considering a psychopharmacological approach to Media Use
4:15 - 5:30 pm Plenary Session Speaker
Bruce Gronbeck
5:45- 7:00 pm Dinner
7:30 MEA President's Address and Awards Presentation
9:00 film screening
O'Neil, Jamie: The Medium is the Mix
SATURDAY, JUNE 20
9:00 - 10:15 am Panel Sessions
6A: Media Ecology, the Body, and Technology
- Paul Grossweiler: Technobody/ecology
- Ronan Hollowell: Humberto Maturana's and Francisco Varela's Contribution to Media Ecology: Autopoiesis, Communication and Enactive Cognitive Science
- Matthew Killmeier: Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Disembodiment, Media, and Innis and Carey
- Gary Van Den Heuvel: Media Ecology and the Human Body
6B: Award winners panel
Chair: Lance Strate
6C: Popular Culture Studies
Chair / Respondent: Peter Fallon
- Brian Altenhofen: Fantasy Sports
- Eugene Marlow: Jazz in China: The Influence of Technology
- David Olsen: Teletempocomicology: Keeping Time in Graphic Novels
- Alex Wainer: Rationalizing the Dark Knight: Christopher Nolan's Realist Vision of a Mythic Superhero
6D: News, Information, and New Technology
- Laureano Ralon: Sir George R. Parkin & Herbert Marshall McLuhan: Making Sense of a Shrinking World
- Phil Rose: Technopoly, the Warfare State, and the Revolution in Military Affairs
- Brecken Swartz: Providing Food for Thought: The Strategic Enterprise of International Broadcasting
- Christine Tracy: Designing Conscious Consumption: News and Information Delivery as an Ecosystem
10:30 - 11:45 am Plenary Session Speaker
Alan Kay
11:45 am - 1:15 pm Lunch
1:15 - 2:30 Panel Sessions
7A: Visual Media, Visual Practices
- Catherine Adams: iPowerPoint: Teachers Teaching with Digital Media Technologies
- Gerald Erion: Postman, Pictures, and Premise-Conclusion Arguments
- Ellen Rose: Reading in Screen Space: University Students' Lived Experiences with Online Text
- Jennifer Stebick: Toward a Theory of Iconic Literacy
7B: Media Ecology and Ecology
- Antonio Almeida: Advertsiment and greener consumption: a study of advertisement at Brazilian magazines
- Cecilia Chen: The Babble of Water
- Arthur Hunt: Virtual Exceeding, Nature Receding: Nature-Deficit Disorder, Videophilia, and Silicon Faith
- Roberto Lestinge: Media Ecology in Brazil: How Globo TV creates public opinion about the environment
7C: Soundscape Technology, Music, Space, and Consciousness
Chair: Leo J. Fahey
Media technologies create life environments having definite effects on people within them. This panel looks at the psychic states fashioned within the environments that "soundscape technologies" create. Five explorations examine different soundscape technology environments and the psychic shaping affects produced within.
- Robert MacDougall: A Media Ecological Look at the Sonic Life of the New Citizen
- Brent Malin: Electrifying Speeches: The Technologizing of the Voice in the Early 20th Century US
- Thom Gencarelli: iFi, or the Near Future for Music Consumption.
- James C. Morrison: My Consumers Are They Not My Producers?: A McLuhanesque Exploration of Digital Musical Reproduction
- Leo J. Fahey: Positively Parsley, Sage and Time: The Altered State of Middle Age Consciousness Under the Power of Resonating Sixties Tunes While Driving 60 Miles Per Hour on the Rural Roads of New York and Massachusetts at Dusk
7D: Men, Women, and the Elderly
- Al Auster: thirtysomething and Men
- Wanner Curt: "The Disappearance of Seniorhood": Examining the multiculturalism of children's programming
- Read Schuchardt: The Disappearance of Women: Technology, Media, and the Obsolescence of Gender
2:45 - 4:00 pm Plenary Session Speaker
Kathleen Rowe
4:15 - 5:30 pm Panel Sessions
8A: Media Ecology and the Natural Environment
Chair: Paul Grossweiler
8B: General Semantics Workshop
Organizer: Lance Strate
8C: Cell Phones and Cellular Practices
- Stephanie Bennett: Silence, Solitude, and Real Presence: A Qualitative Study of the Relational Ramifications of Personal Mobile Media Use
- Linda Berdayes: Secondary Orality and Mobile Phones
- Ray Gozzi: The Cell Phone Zone
- Anne Pym: Civic Engagement, Presence, and Cellular Phone
8D: Places of Fullness: Technologies of Space and Time
Chair: Anthony Wachs
The most basic and universal media that mankind has contact with are space and time. The relationship between these two mediums has been the subject of a great deal of philosophy, both Western and Eastern, throughout time. Issues of time and space influence whole religious, philosophic, cultural systems. Recently, Charles Taylor has posited that the shift of the "place of fullness," a concept intimately connected to space and time, is a primary element of "the secular age" in which we live. This panel seeks to address places of fullness through the metaphors of space and time. The specific focus of this panel is to explore alternative technologies that affect how persons approach places of "fullness" within postmodernity. The postmodern technologies that allow for moral spaces of fullness are at once embodied and technological, communal and individuated, temporal and transcendent. This panel investigates how these technologies allow persons to work within, and at times transcend, the mediums of space and time. Each essay will articulate the claim that though these technologies are not traditionally acceptable sources of modern media, they are in no way obsolete.
- John Jasso: Sacred Places and Cyberspaces: A Neoplatonic Perspective
- Joel Ward: Sunday Morning Church: A Post Modern "Place of Fullness"
- Anthony M. Wachs: Technological Transcendence: The Place of Technology in the Roman Rite of the Mass
- Celeste Grayson: The Body as Media in Social Movements
5:45 - 7:15 pm: Dinner
7:30 pm: Multimedia Presentation
Thus Spoke The Spectacle (Eric Goodman)
SUNDAY, JUNE 21
9:00 - 10:15 am Panel Sessions
9A: Academic Reading Spaces, Reading Practices
- Lynne Alexandrovna: Some Online "Yeast" for Graduate Students
- Jerry Harp: Father Ong and the Places of Study
- Bob Logan & Van Alstyne: The SmartBook (sBook) that is Readable, Searchable Networked and Smart: A Third Option for Publishers
- Tony Nelson: The ABCs of Western Writing: Literacy and Meaning-Making in the age of Free and Open Publishing
9B: Organizing Knowledge, People, and Corporations
- Mary Aiello & Christine Tracy: Triangulating Media Theories To Analyze The Failure of First Energy's Communication Network During The 2003 Midwest blackout.
- Jack Ciak: Media Ecology and the Organizational System: An Inquiry
- Eyal Sivan: What is the Connective?
- Gilbert Wilkes: Graphic Expression as reliable signaling: How stripes on a fish can help explain eXtensible Markup Language (XML)
9C: Arena v. Arena : The Media Ecology of Cultural Information
Chair: David Walczyk
Sometimes things need to get worse before they get better and sometimes we need artists that follow-through. This panel bridges the perhaps overlooked, yet fertile, ground between media ecology and cultural information. Specific attention is given to the pragmatism of this relationship as it occurs in the decay, design, and sustainability of (public) spaces and places.
- Stephanie Gibson: [Fables of the (De)construction : Photographing Obsolescence
- Paul Guzzardo: A Walk on the Digital Sublime; and Other Extinction Stories
- David Walczyk: DriftCodes: From the Thoughts of the Heart to the Soul of Our World
10:30 - 11:45 am Media Ecology Association Business Meeting
11:45 am Close
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