The Media Ecology Association at the 55th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association May 26–30, 2005 New York City Sheraton New York
Communication: Questioning the Dialogue
This year’s ICA conference theme, “Communication: Questioning the Dialogue,” is a perfect one for media ecological inquiries.
Media ecology denotes an approach to media studies that is multidisciplinary in its origin, scope, and practice. Drawing upon philosophy, linguistics, the history of technology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, information science, rhetorical studies, economics, general semantics, ecology, and literature, media ecology seeks to examine the multifaceted and often concealed roles that complex communication systems play in the environments in which they operate and which they create.
As a discipline, media ecology has its roots in the work of Marshall Mc Luhan, Neil Postman, Walter Ong, Lewis Mumford, Harold Innis, and others, and has evolved since the 1970s as innovations such as computer-mediated communication, the Internet, and digital technologies have changed traditional analog mass media forms, person-to-person interactions, and the ways in which cultures create, manipulate, and transmit information.
It also reflects the increased emphasis on interdisciplinary inquiry that has transformed ommunications scholarship in these decades. In short, it is a Renaissance discipline that seeks to ask and explore questions that challenge our assumptions about “communication” and in doing so redefines the scope of communication scholarship as well as the permeable and ever-expanding boundaries of media ecology itself.
To this end, the Media Ecology Association is sponsoring a panel to bring together a group of diverse scholars whose innovative work pushes against and works across disciplinary boundaries to create “new” media ecological frameworks, perspectives, and inquiries.
New Directions in Media Ecology
Chair: MJ Robinson, New York University
“Code: Radical Languages of the Information Age,” Claudia Herbst, Pratt Institute
“Mimesis, Memory, Media: The Digital and Analog in Modernist Aesthetics,” Lee Simons, Department of English, Simon Fraser University
“History and the Lessons for Theoretical Construction: Textual Scientific Mediation and the Court of Alfonso X,” Clark Callahan, University of South Dakota
“Towards Broadcast Ecology: Narrative Awareness and Accountability in Transnational War Coverage,” Lars Lundsten and Matteo Stocchetti, Prefekt Institute for Media, Finland
Respondent: Lance Strate, Fordham University