All of the readings this week indicate to one point: media shapes (at least parts of) our world, instead of simply transmitting messages. Well, there's also the commoness that they don't focus as so much on OK-so-what-should-we-do-about-it, but still a important step to discuss our keyword of this week, namely "media ecology".

To confess, before I actually started to join this academic field quite a few years ago, I thought Innis/McLuhan's works are the "Bible" for media studies. Such is the popularity, in most part due to their intuitive work to suggest media as a driving force for societal forms and their evolution. To put short, they suggest that the way we communicate is the way we have been forming societies, and we communicate via media. Meyerowitz's piece develops the McLuhanian vision into further detail. How electronical media shapes and changes roles in a society (BTW, I discovered only when I was halfway through reading it that this book was written back in 85, and he didn't have "new" new media such as Internet in mind...). Then we have Gitlin, the prominent figure in "framing theory", tell us how we are literally overflooded with media. So to put their suggestions together, media shapes society and it is more than full of it. Not too hard to agree upon. Notwithstanding methodological shortcomings, but Meyerowitz already talked about it.

Certainly I agree, but the question whether it functions as an "ecology" does require a lot more thoughts. I don't think that one call it an 'ecology' only because it is all around us. To call it an ecology, it should at least 1) have an self-sustaining system that's formed on a fully cycling chain (not necessarily one-way), and 2) power stuructures that can bring or break the balance should be present; 3) And our lives - or social behaviour, in Meyerozitz's terms - should be part of that process. In McLuhan's pieces media is a driving force, but little is discussed on why new media technologies came forth and were chosen to be implemented(I wonder what his answers would have been, if he knew the fact that the movable type was invented in Korea 200 years before Gutenberg, but didn't have such grand impacts on society as in the latter). media 'forms' our societies and behaviour, but how do we 'form' media in a specific social setting? I think that is the other half of the cycle to explore into the ecology question.