I am writing this blog from the Ninth Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association, meeting this year on the campus of Santa Clara University, in California. This organization is dedicated to the study of the interconnections among all parts of the human lifeworld, with a particular emphasis on technologies of communication–writing, print, the telephone, radio, television, the Internet, and on and on. With its sensitivity to complex interactions and dynamic evolutions, media ecology seeks to discern and interpret patterns by which we understand ourselves, each other, and the world–realizing the deep and thoroughgoing connections among all three, each of which we experience only in relationship to the other two.
While the dominant figures whose work inspires and continues to influence the members of this organization largely began their work in some form of literary study, each sought to make multiple connections with other areas of investigation, experience, and action. Neil Postman studied English education and went on to write extensively about general educational concerns and the roles, as well as the hazards, of communications technologies. H. Marshall McLuhan studied literature and went on to investigate the influences of technologies as extensions of the human body, causing reorganizations of how we use the sensorium in our negotiations with and navigations of the world, yielding his famous (and often misunderstood) axioms “The medium is the message” and “The World is a global village.” After finishing an undergraduate degree in Classics, Walter J. Ong studied philosophy and theology as a member of the Jesuit order and then studied literature (writing his M.A. thesis under Mcluhan before writing his dissertation under Perry Miller at Harvard) and went on to write studies not only of orality and literacy, but also of the various and shifting roles of the senses in human knowing. Besides their influential scholarly work, each also lived as a devoted teacher, as the oral traditions still circulating among the participants in this conference readily bear witness.
But this organizazation is not simply about celebrating these figures from the past, for it remains dynamic and on the move. As the organization’s president, Lance Strate, who just last night gave his final address before stepping down after nearly ten years of service in this role, puts it in his book Echoes and Reflections (Hampton Press), as we move into a realm more and more of understanding the complex interactions of all parts of our world, we confront the need to understand not only in dialogic terms, but also in terms of such a paralogic as enables us to confront apparent contradictions, as well as to move toward an ecologic that understands all of actuality in terms of intersecting patterns and dynamic interactions (p. 3). Thus, this conference calls attention to the need for more and more interdisciplinary study. While a few of us here have backgrounds in literature, many come with expertise in communications, rhetoric, and the sciences–all of which I find to be compelling and necessary areas of investigation. For example, the physicist Fritjof Capra spoke about the uncanny ability of Leonardo da Vinci to experience and understand the world as both a scientist and an artist, and how these (broadly speaking) two realms of pursuit helped to reinforce each other. As Leonardo himself wrote, “Painting embraces within itself all the forms of nature.” The understanding of the artist became also the insight of the scientist. As Capra emphasized in his talk, da Vinci’s attentiveness to detail and to complexity helped him to see and understand the world around him in astonishingly novel ways, even though (and perhaps in part, for him, because) he lacked the classical education of his contemporaries. It may be that because he lacked the very education that proved so helpful and even necessary and empowering to others, and because he pursued his own educational formation with the combined discipline and devotion of a professional athlete and a professed monk (neither of which he was in any formal sense), he was able to discern and develop patterns unavailable to others in his era. In his own lecture, the vascular surgeon Leonard Shlain, who has written several prominent books on brain development, the sensorium, and the effects of the alphabet, speculated, based on the available evidence, that da Vinci’s brain must have had a very powerful corpus callosum, the part of the brain that connects the right and left hemispheres. In effect, the two sides of his brain could readily communicate, meaning that the more detached functions that tend to be associated with the left side of the brain could “talk with” the more sympathetic functions that tend to be associated with the right side of the brain. Another way to put what may have had a grounding in da Vinci’s brain is the need for both proximity and distance. If I don’t have some proximity, some experience, of what I am investigating, then I do not have a basic grounding in the subject matter. If I do not have some distance from what I am investigating, then I am likely to be too involved to come to any legitimate insights. If Dr. Shlain’s speculation is correct–which seems quite likely–then da Vinci’s styles of knowing were quite dynamic and interactive, involving shifting interactions among the senses and between the two sides of the brain.
While no one here is claiming to be the next Leonardo–hubris is very little in evidence here–there is a general understanding that as human beings we must as much as possible combine our creativity and analytical skills, theory and practice, insights and actions, values, valences, and professional skills. One especially striking presentation today was “The Civic Soul: Public Space Remixed and Curative Archive,” by the media activist and artist Paul Guzzardo and David Walczyk of the Pratt Institute. They used the figure of the city wanderer in Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” as the basis for interactive software that allows one to move through the story–which of course need not be read in the exact order in which it was published–in conjunction with maps and urban images, even up-to-the-minute images with indications of precise locations, in accordance with one’s choosing. Thus, Poe’s story is remixed in this interactive computer piece as older songs are remixed in contemporary music. The user of the program becomes both author and performer working in collaboration with Poe and the program designers, which include almost twenty of Professor Walczyk’s students.
What seems to be happening in the Media Ecology Association is precisely more and more interaction of various kinds as we come to realize that as important as expertise in a single discipline continues to be, the ability to work to some extent in the languages of other disciplines is becoming more urgent–which is not to say that there has ever been a time or place when singular disciplinary training sufficed across all members of a given society. There has always been a need for human beings to do and to know something of a variety of things. It’s just that in our own age, with our increasingly global and cosmopolitan sense of the world, with the proliferation of information and communications technologies, with the accelerating pace of change in the world, we now know perhaps as never before that a large part of what it means to be human is to adapt, to change, and yes to specialize, but also constantly to work to broaden our understanding and areas of knowledge. Such broadening, without foregoing the depth of spcialization, does not mean giving into the fantasy of a general theory of everything, a totalizing system. As Joshua Meyrowitz emphasized in his talk “Power, Pleasure, Patterns: Intersecting Narratives of Media Influence,” the dominant modes of communicatons studies–with their emphases on power (using, for example, the thought of Marx), on pleasure and human fulfilment (using, for example, Maslow), and patterns of interaction (media ecology)–should realize that each mode of analysis specializes in disclosing some part of actuality unavailable to the others, and that no single approach suffices.
After a panel that he chaired, Corey Anton, the editor of the journal Explorations in Media Ecology, suggested in an offhand though I think very insightful remark that, however else one conducts one’s investigations, being well read remains at the core of the methodology of media ecology. Of course, learning both deeply and widely remains a core ideal of the liberal arts. The Media Ecology Association stands as one of the conspicuously dynamic and creative manifestatons of liberals arts activity in the world today.