KEYNOTE ADDRESS: On the Binding Biases of Time

Lance Strate is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, and Executive Director of the Institute of General Semantics. He is a Past President of the New York State Communication Association, and a recipient of NYSCA\u27s John F. Wilson Award. He is a founder and Past President of the Media Ecology Association, and author of Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a Field of Study. This is the text of his Keynote Address presented at the 67th Annual Conference of the New York State Communication Association, Ellenville, NY, October 23-25, 2009

Notes on Narrative as Medium and a Media Ecology Approach to the Study of Storytelling

Storytelling, as a distinctively human characteristic, is a product of our capacity for language and symbolic communication. Just as language is considered a medium within the field of media ecology, so too can narrative be understood as a medium of communication, as well as a kind of language, and as a fundamentally social phenomenon. As a medium, narrative interacts with and is modified by other media, undergoing significant change as it is expressed through oral tradition, dramatic performance, written documents, and audiovisual media. In particular, major changes in the nature of character and plot accompany the shift from orality to literacy, and writing and especially printing make possible new forms of tragedy as opposed to comedy, prose as opposed to poetry, and fiction as opposed to nonfiction. Storytelling continues to mutate through the introduction of new media, with increasingly greater emphasis on narrative as an environment, especially one associated with social interaction and gaming

Counting Electric Sheep: Understanding Information in the Context of Media Ecology

informatio

El medio y el mensaje de McLuhan: La tecnología, extensión y amputación del ser humano

�The medium is the message�, the best known of McLuhan�s aphorisms, explains concisely and poetically the Canadian author�s approach to media ecology studies and is also an inspiring thought. Many criticisms have been aimed at this issue, with the intention of discrediting the author, rather than discussing his axiom. The media, in a broad sense, are both extensions and amputations of human beings, given that technology works, in practice, as a prosthesis. For McLuhan, contemporary society was a chaotic whirl, as he expounds in The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), in which observation is the only way to make any sense.�El medio es el mensaje�, el aforismo más conocido de McLuhan, explica de manera concisa y poética el planteamiento que ofrece el autor canadiense a los estudios de la ecología de los medios, sirviendo como invitación a la reflexión. Sobre este aspecto se han lanzado abundantes críticas, dirigidas más a desprestigiar al autor, que a debatir su axioma. Los medios, en un sentido amplio, son extensiones del ser humano, y también amputaciones, ya que la tecnología funciona, en la práctica, como prótesis. La sociedad contemporánea era, para McLuhan, un remolino caótico, como expone en La Novia Mecánica: Folclore del hombre industrial (1951), en el que solo se puede encontrar sentido a través del camino de la observación

Korzybski, Luhmann, and McLuhan

This paper revisits an earlier study of the common ground shared by Alfred Korzybski, founder of general semantics, and Marshall McLuhan, the central figure in media ecology, and makes explicit the use of systems theory to bridge the gap between the two. Following a brief summary of the systems approach and its relationship to the media ecology intellectual tradition, sociologist Niklas Luhmann is identified as an appropriate mediator between Korzybski and McLuhan, for his application of the concept of autopoiesis to the study of society. Korzybski’s key term of abstracting is compared to McLuhan’s emphasis on medium, and suggests that McLuhan’s true concern was with a process of mediating rather than a medium as a thing. Korzybski only discussed abstracting in quantitative terms, i.e., levels or orders of abstracting, but McLuhan’s approach suggests the need to distinguish between qualitative differences as well, in the form of the mode of abstracting