media Ecology

Media ecology aims to describe ways in which diverse media environments shape today's society and our everyday lives. And the central premise of the theory is that the communication content doesn't exert nearly as much influence as the medium of communication itself does. 

Origins:

The phrase media ecology was officially introduced and coined in 1968 by the media theorist Neil postman. However, what initially inspired the phrase was Marshall McLuhan's theory proposed in his 1964 book, Understanding Media. McLuhan was the first to suggest that the focus of the study should be media and not the content it communicates. Aside from McLuhan, today, the media economy theory recognizes various influences, which are rooted in sociology, history, education, and economy of the 20th century. Over the years, many theorists have offered their definitions and views of media ecology. Aside from Postman, the most significant among them are Christine Nystrom, Lance Strate, and Robert Logan. 

Media as Environments:

Postman, Nystrom, and Strate have defined media ecology in quite similar ways. They suggest that media, or rather, a medium is a technological context, the environment that consists of communication systems within which we live, and which shape our culture. As such, that environment inevitably affects our perceptions, feelings, values, and beliefs. Logan expanded upon the definition by suggesting that media ecology is also based on feedback that flows back and forth between an environment and a medium. Medium receives data, processes it, and returns it to the environment, which in turn processes that output, and returns the new data to the medium.

Influence:

The reason why media ecology is so relevant today is that it's impossible to understand cultural and social change without analyzing the mechanisms of media as environments we live in. 

More info about Media Ecology Theory:

The medium is the message, he even wrote a book with that name, expect when the proofs came back from the type setter as the medium is the massage. He liked the mistake in the title so much he kept it.

The medium in the message is a deliberately paradoxical statement. When you get a message its the message that the message, the content rather than its form. 

McCurley