This element of Richards' perspective on communication influenced the way in which McLuhan expressed many of his ideas using metaphors and phrases such as " The Global Village" and " The Medium Is the Message", two of his most well-known phrases that encapsulate the theory of media ecology.įew theories receive the kind of household recognition that media ecology received, due directly to McLuhan's role as a pop culture icon. Richards believed that "words won't stay put and almost all verbal constructions are highly ambiguous". McLuhan admired Richards' approach to the critical view that English studies are themselves nothing but a study of the process of communication. Richards, a distinguished English professor, who would inspire McLuhan's later scholarly works. During his studies at Cambridge, he became acquainted with one of his professors, I.A. In 1934, Marshall McLuhan enrolled as a student at Cambridge University, a school which pioneered modern literary criticism. 2.3.2 Connection to general systems theoryīackground Marshall McLuhan.1.4 North American, European and Eurasian versions.McLuhan proposed that media influence the progression of society, and that significant periods of time and growth can be categorized by the rise of a specific technology during that period.Īdditionally, scholars have compared media broadly to a system of infrastructure that connect the nature and culture of a society with media ecology being the study of "traffic" between the two. McLuhan is famous for coining the phrase, " the medium is the message", which is an often-debated phrase believed to mean that the medium chosen to relay a message is just as important (if not more so) than the message itself. Media ecology argues that media act as extensions of the human senses in each era, and communication technology is the primary cause of social change. An environment is, after all, a complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving." The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people. Neil Postman states, "if in biology a 'medium' is something in which a bacterial culture grows (as in a Petri dish), in media ecology, the medium is 'a technology within which a culture grows.'" In other words, "Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. Įcology in this context refers to the environment in which the medium is used – what they are and how they affect society. The theoretical concepts were proposed by Marshall McLuhan in 1964, while the term media ecology was first formally introduced by Neil Postman in 1968. Media ecology theory is the study of media, technology, and communication and how they affect human environments. Study of media, technology, and communication