Thursday, September 4, 2008

Media Ecology Association 10th Birthday, 9/4/08

Today is the 10th birthday of the creation of the Media Ecology Association, an organization that is close to my heart.

What is Media Ecology and the MEA? It is an interdisciplinary study of language, technology, culture, and symbols, with heavy emphasis of social critics like Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman (who arguable coined the phrase Media Ecology), Jacques Ellul, Walter Ong, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Douglas Rushkoff, Harold Innis, Lewis Mumford, Eric Havelock, Susanne Langer, Erving Goffman, Edward T. Hall, George Herbert Mead, Margaret Mead, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and Gregory Bateson, and language philosophies like General Semantics.

For more information on the MEA, check them out here:
media-ecology.org.
Wikipedia on Media Ecology:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_ecology

Institute of General Semantics:
generalsemantics.org
Wikipedia on General Semantics:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics

This video sort of sums it all up in a humerous way:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsHhNCLaT5s

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MEDIA ECOLOGY ASSOCIATION!!!

2 comments:

  1. Thanks, Bob! I remember the very first time I saw the film of you singing this, in the mid-1990s at conference for the New York University Media Ecology Department, up in Sacks Lodge. Stuck in my mind for years, until it made it to YouTube. Great work. And then when I finally got to meet you at an MEA conference, well, it just proved that even after all these years, you have kept your sense of humor. It is a pleasure to know you.

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