Taking issue.

MEDIA ECOLOGIES: MATERIALIST ENERGIES IN ART AND TECHNOCULTURE

BY MATTHEW FULLER

CAMBRIDGE, MA: MIT PRESS, 2005

240 PP./$34.95 (SB)

If you believe that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, that the map is not the territory, and that you can't judge a book by its cover, then you will probably want to skip ahead to the last paragraph. If, on the other hand, you believe that the medium is the message, and that a good name is better than riches, then you may understand my concern over the title of Matthew Fuller's new book, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Of course, we are all free to make our own choices as to what to call the books we write. I could, if I wanted to, publish a book entitled Psychoanalyses, and make little or no reference to Sigmund Freud and the approach he pioneered. But should I be surprised at the criticisms and objections that would inevitably follow? So, for the record, let me state that Media Ecologies has relatively little to do with "media ecology," a term that emerged out of conversations between Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, and Eric McLuhan in 1967. That was the year that McLuhan moved from Toronto to Postman's hometown, New York City, to assume the Albert Schweitzer Chair of the Humanities at Fordham University; it was also the year that McLuhan's bestselling and stylistically groundbreaking book, The Medium is the Massage, was published.

The following year, Postman formally introduced the term "media ecology" in an address he gave at the annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English (later published as "The Reformed English Curriculum" in the anthology High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education [1970]). By 1971, Postman had launched a doctoral program in media ecology at New York University, and his description of the curriculum appears in The Soft Revolution: A Student Handbook for Turning Schools Around (1971). Not surprisingly, the term media ecology is most closely associated with Postman, his colleagues, and students, and also with McLuhan and his associates and followers, such as the pioneering video artists Paul Ryan (McLuhan's assistant at Fordham) and Frank Gillette.

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Through the networks surrounding Postman and McLuhan, the term media ecology has diffused across a variety of intellectual, literary, and artistic networks, and also within the media industries and among professional and amateur users of computer and information technologies. As it has made its way across these networks, the tradition and perspective that media ecology represents appears to have gone through the kinds of distortions familiar from the childhood game of telephone. Fuller, who is a reader in media design at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, appears to have encountered media ecology somewhere very far down the line, at so much of a remove from the original sources that they are at best distant echoes to him. For example, he begins a cursory, four-page discussion of what is meant by media ecology by stating that the term "is used and in circulation in a number of ways" (2), and this is followed up with an endnote that reads: "Historical precedent is not what is at issue here. However, the earliest use of the term that I have noticed is an intriguing short article in the form of a set of notes in a magazine of experimental video" (179). Now, if historical precedent is not at issue, why bring it up, and why make a claim about the earliest use of the term? And making the claim on the basis of what the author has "noticed" is certainly an informal approach to research and scholarship. And this article that he noticed is a product of McLuhan's network, and specifically the milieu of Gillette and Ryan--a fact that apparently escapes Fuller.

It seems to me that Fuller realizes he is treading on thin ice as he goes on to write that media ecology

  is ambiguous, too, given its number of different current uses. That
  these uses exist, that the present work does not attempt to find a
  'new' title for itself, is intended to enhance the way in which this
  book uses pre-existing objects as being more loaded than the new and
  innocent, and hence potentially more powerful when dimensions of
  relationality that are virtual to them (but that perhaps remain
  hidden) are brought to the fore or potentiated. (3)

There is a slippery quality to this defense, and I for one would rather have seen Fuller declare that he is appropriating media ecology for his own purposes, and leave it at that. Instead he tries to have it both ways: "It is not the intention of this book to spend its entire course fidgeting with a possible hermeneutics of the term, but a brief mapping of its concurrent uses will usefully serve to locate the areas of concern here" (3). In other words, he wishes to draw us a map, but does not want to be held accountable for its accuracy.

His map then begins with the statement, "'Media ecology,' or more often 'information ecology,' is deployed as a euphemism for the allocation of informational roles in organizations and in computer-supported collaborative work" (3). In what sense is media ecology more often known as "information ecology"? Fuller does not say, and certainly offers no evidence for the claim. In what sense are the terms interchangeable, even if information ecology is a relatively new variant (taking its place alongside communication ecology, technology ecology, etc.)? The definition offered is far removed from the core concerns of the intellectual tradition, and while it certainly is worth including, why begin the discussion here? No justification is given. Fuller goes on to contrast the pro-technology bias of information ecology with what he perceives to be an anti-technology bias characteristic of media ecology proper: "In a related sense, in that there is something of a shared predisposition to an uncomplicated but rather more spiritually troubled technological determinism, is another use of the term by a current surrounding media commentator and educationalist Neil Postman" (3).

Of course Fuller uses the label "technological determinism," without any discussion, citation, or evidence; in this he is no different than most of the critics who use that straw man argument. But let me note at this point that Postman is not listed in Fuller's bibliography, so I am at a loss to explain the basis of his assessment of Postman's predisposition. He continues with, "Here, 'media ecology' describes a kind of environmentalism: using a study of media to sustain a relatively stable notion of human culture. The intellectual background of this current includes Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, Harold Innis, Walter Ong, and Jacques Ellul--a vivid set of resources" (3-4). But of this vivid set, only McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) and Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982) appear in Fuller's bibliography, and only McLuhan appears in any further discussion, mostly on the idea of the "rearview mirror," which does not appear in Understanding Media at all. The claim that media ecology proper is all about sustaining a relatively stable notion of human culture is unsubstantiated, and misleading.

Fuller then identifies a third form of media ecology coming out of literary studies and the work of Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, and Joseph Tabbi (the last editor of an anthology that also invokes media ecology at some remove). While Fuller acknowledges that there is a relationship between Kittler and McLuhan, he fails to recognize the fact that McLuhan, and Ong as well, and to a lesser extent Postman, all worked in literary studies and English education. Finally, Fuller reveals that his own major influences are Manuel De Landa, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Howard Slater. These scholars are not at all incompatible with media ecology proper, and in fact reflect McLuhan's early influence on poststructuralism and postmodernism (a point that goes unacknowledged by Fuller), and while an integration of these different approaches would be welcome, Fuller does not attempt it. To his credit, he does draw upon Gregory Bateson's ecology of mind, J.J. Gibson's ecology of perception, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's media ecological work on remediation, and other interesting sources. But, for example, in an otherwise interesting discussion of lists, Michel Foucault is invoked but no mention is made of Jack Goody, whose definitive analysis of the list as a technology of the written word, in The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), is an example of media ecological scholarship par excellence.

So, Media Ecologies is not media ecology in any standard sense of the word, but how would it smell by any other name? Fuller looks at various bits and pieces of our contemporary media environment, such as pirate radio, cameras, webcams, and memes, and includes a fascinating account of the Warsaw Eruv. These and other worthwhile topics are subject to some examination, and Fuller is not without his insights. The subject matter is mostly a jumping off point for theoretical discussion, rather than sustained analysis. For those who favor poststructuralist and postmodernist discourse, this book will be a welcome addition to the work of De Landa, Deleuze, and Guattari. For others, the passages quoted here should provide you with a representative sample of Fuller's writing style, and on that basis you can decide whether you might find this book sweet, or thorny.

LANCE STRATE is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Ford-ham University, President of the Media Ecology Association, and co-editor of the anthology The Legacy of McLuhan (2005), and Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment (1996), now in its second edition.

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See Afterimage Volume 33, no. 5 (March/April 2006) for a review (by Nancy Roth) of Katherine Hayles's new book My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005).