This is the draft of the talk I’m preparing to give tomorrow at Tsinghua; by then I’ll basically plan to read straight from the script, of course after finishing I’ll probably also expand on certain parts extemporaneously depending on how things go…
This talk aims to offer a brief and accessible overview of the basic claims of my dissertation. My dissertation involves many problems, and the relationships among its chapters are originally rather loose, so it is not very easy to distill. Here I can only focus on a few core concepts. Since I have avoided the most abstruse parts (ontology and transcendental philosophy) and the most concrete parts (each scholar’s specific achievements), this overview may seem somewhat hollow; still, once the potentially confusing parts are removed, perhaps the basic intent of my dissertation can be displayed more clearly as a whole.
My dissertation is titled “The Strong Program of Media History—A Philosophical Interpretation of Media Ecology.” This “strong program” is a “slogan” I coined by imitating the formulation of SSK. On the one hand, it signals certain commonalities between my view and SSK; on the other hand, it is also a bit of a bluff, so here I won’t linger over the label “strong program.” What remains, then, are simply the following keywords: media, history, environment, philosophy.
Philosophy is precisely human self-reflection: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? And the three words “media, history, environment” happen to be answers to basic philosophical questions, or rather, we can only seek the answers we need from within them.
In the final analysis, the three concepts of media, history, and environment all emphasize the same thing: human actuality, or in other words, finitude.
Media points out that humans always need “something through which” to accomplish something; people need to rely on the body and on instruments in order to perceive the world and act in it, and these things that must be relied on are all real—they are not ideal, not perfect, and they have shortcomings.
History points out human “fate,” human temporality. Human beings always have a beginning and an end; it is impossible to realize all possibilities. Certain things happened, while others did not: this is our history. We are thrown into some historical situation. What we possess is not entirely up to our own choice, but is granted by history in a way that is both accidental and fateful.
Environment points out human limits. Human beings are always situated within an environment; in other words, we are always swept along by the world we inhabit, and we are always the center of our own world.
The “center” spoken of here is in complete opposition to the arrogance and self-importance of so-called “anthropocentrism.” On the contrary, this fate of “being situated at the center” reveals human smallness. We cannot, like God, stand apart from all things; we can only be among things and within the world, only stand where we are, and under the limited conditions provided by our historical and living environments, we can know and transform the world only through media that are never omnipotent, never transparent, and always somehow biased or obstructive. Human beings cannot usurp a God’s-eye view that overlooks everything; our perspective always begins from its own finite background. We continually transcend our narrowness, yet we can never ultimately escape our own finitude. That is to say, from beginning to end, human beings can only deal with the world as finite “I.” In this sense, we are always at the center.
At this point it is worth mentioning the naming issue of “media ecology.” My dissertation is formally based on the North American school of media ecology as its object of study. “Media ecology” emerged in North America in the latter half of the twentieth century. It was founded on the Toronto School represented by figures such as Innis and McLuhan. In 1970, Postman established a doctoral program in media ecology at New York University, forming the academic base of the New York School. In 1998, with the New York School at its center, the “Media Ecology Association” was founded. “Media ecology” originated from a multidimensional academic tradition—history of civilization, economic history, cultural criticism, rhetoric, philosophy, education, and so on—but not communication studies. Yet after establishing itself, it instead moved toward communication studies, striving to become the “third school” of communication studies. The Media Ecology Association became a division of the American Communication Association in 1999, a division of the Eastern Communication Association in 2002, and an institutional member of the International Communication Association in 2003…
I am trying to give media ecology a new positioning, no longer as “the third school of communication studies,” but as a basic program of history of technology and philosophy of technology. But the real purpose of re-positioning this school is, in essence, to re-position “media.” In ordinary communication studies, “media” is merely the object or topic of research; whereas in the horizon of media ecology, “media” is not the “center” but the “environment,” the background and context of research.
Since the concept of “media” functions as the “environment” of scholarly research and historical narration, the interest of media ecologists is not to delve into “media problems,” but to use “media” to study “problems.” Therefore, the “media history” I propose is a program, not a subject; under the program of media history, dimensions such as cultural history, history of war, history of science, history of philosophy, history of art, and so on can also be unfolded.
So, the reason I use “media ecology” rather than the literal “media ecology” to designate this school is not only out of respect for senior scholars such as He Daokuan, but also out of a scholarly concern to return to first principles and clarify the source. Originally, when Postman borrowed this name to establish a degree program, he was mostly just using a more fashionable label to win support from the university administration. The core term used by media ecologists, including Postman himself, has always been “environment.” The connotations suggested by “environment”—background, margin, context, conditions, and so on—are precisely what media ecology especially emphasizes, whereas the word “ecology” loses these meanings.
More importantly, from the ecological perspective, human beings seem no longer to be at the center, but to stand alongside all things. Yet this precisely requires a detached, commanding vantage point—the so-called “scientific” or “objective” perspective, that is, to examine both human beings and all things as “objects” of study. But this objectification is still conditional, still contextual, still mediated; we only complete this objectification by starting from the natural sciences. In other words, in the ecological perspective, although the human being as object of study is no longer the “center,” the scientist has become the new “center.” If the existence of this fateful, unavoidable “center” has not been reflected upon, then people may fall into an even deeper hubris. In fact, strictly speaking, the problem of contemporary science is not “anthropocentrism,” but “centrifugal humanism” or “theocentrism” — humans, or more precisely scientists, have taken God’s place as the detached point of departure. Media ecology, by contrast, precisely wants to bring human beings down from the clouds back to the “center,” and turn the world or all things back from ready-made “objects” standing before human beings into an “environment” surrounding our bodies.
McLuhan once noted that “the Greek etymology of environment is perivello, meaning: attack from all directions simultaneously. Environments are not just containers, but are also processes that completely change the content.” In McLuhan’s favored terms, “environment” is a concept of the “auditory-tactile world,” not of the “visual world.” Vision tends toward detachment; the gaze is active, sharply bounded, and projected infinitely outward, whereas the ear passively receives influences arriving from all directions.
McLuhan liked to use “electric light,” the simplest medium, to explain what it means that the medium is the message or that media create environments: the meaning of the electric lamp does not lie in your seeing the lamp, but in the lamp making it possible for you to see. Through electric light, a world is presented, while electric light itself remains hidden in the background. And the world illuminated by electric light, compared with the original dim world, is not merely a difference in degree such as 20 percent to 80 percent clarity; rather, a paradigm shift occurs—for example, a shift from a world weighted toward auditory-tactile experience to one dominated by vision. Experience, knowledge, and value all change accordingly.
McLuhan playfully used “the medium is the massage” to interpret his own maxim “the medium is the message.” He said that the environment created by media is some kind of behavior or process, not a cold shell; it “acts upon” our sensory life.
In short, media ecology is not centered on media, but treats media as environment and studies its effects on human beings.
This attitude may seem somewhat paradoxical: we want to study the effects of media, yet we do not place media at the center of focus—how is such scholarship possible?
In fact, the mode of thinking involved in this scholarship is not difficult at all; it is nothing more than the attitude we adopt in everyday “learning” of a medium.
When we become familiar with a certain medium and habitually use it, that is, do something through it, it hides itself and sinks into the background, while what we focus on is the object indicated or presented by the medium. For example, when I look at pictures wearing glasses, when I give a talk through Mc, when I speak with Teacher Jiang by telephone, and so on: what is at the focus, what is presented as object, is the picture, the paper, or Teacher Jiang; while what serves as medium, such as glasses, Mc, the telephone, and so on, remains hidden as environment. In other situations, what was originally a medium may again become an object—for instance, when I take off my glasses to inspect them. And the reason these objects are able to appear is always that new media are inserted between us and them; even when we want to observe the glasses in our hands, we still need many background conditions, such as appropriate lighting, a proper distance, the coordination and positioning of hand gestures and eyes, and so on. In other words, we always need to keep some distance from the object in some way.
So if we want to examine some thing, do we not seem to have to stop treating it as a medium, as an environment, and instead treat it as an object, placing it at the center?
However, between “putting on” and “taking off,” between “using it without noticing it” and “stepping aside to observe,” there is not a hard binary division; there is also some intermediate state, some state of switching and shifting. Perhaps we can call this third attitude between everyday attitude and scientific attitude the phenomenological attitude.
Or, more simply put, it is the state one is in when “learning” or “trying out” something. For example, when I pick up Mc but have not yet launched into a speech, I may want to “test the sound.” I have already begun using Mc, but I have not yet made the content conveyed through Mc the focus. I may merely utter meaningless syllables like “hello, hello, hello,” or ask through Mc, “Can the students at the back hear me?” At this point, we are both using Mc and, it could also be said, not yet using it; we are both paying attention to Mc and, it could also be said, not paying attention to it. We are attentive to what Mc conveys, but we are not truly concerned with its content. We are listening carefully, but we are not paying attention to whether the syllables “hello, hello, hello” themselves carry any meaning; rather, we are paying attention to or checking the effect or function of Mc upon speech. In this way, we are precisely studying the effect of media, while not placing media at the center of focus.
This is also why media ecology pays attention to media history, especially historical periods when media undergo change. When a new medium has just come to hand but has not yet become familiar and habitual, when one alternates and shifts between different media, the “effects of media” are most easily revealed. And only through historical retracing, through a reenactment of the process of switching and probing, can we make it possible to reflect on those media environments that have long since become our “default configuration” and no longer surprise us, thereby confirming our situation.
It is worth noting that media ecology’s attempt to use historical retracing to reflect on the default configuration of modern people is consistent with Romanticism in this respect. But media ecology does not necessarily seek to resist this technological age, and still less does it oppose technology itself. Broadly speaking, technology is media; human beings are always mediate, or rather, human beings are always embedded in a technological environment. Reflecting on the environment is meant to confirm our position and our limits, and to open up new space, but we can never once and for all escape the constraints of environment. Media ecology emphasizes human actuality; speaking of some idealized “human prototype” detached from any historical situation or technological environment is meaningless.
Air is the resistance to flight, but it is precisely air that makes flight possible. The media environment is, on the one hand, a human limit; on the other hand, it is also the “extension of man” (to use McLuhan’s phrase). This “extension” is less like a ray and more like the extension of a network, with no original “endpoint” to be found, no “human” without extension to be found. What a human being is is determined by his or her extensions; who a person is is decided by how that person deals with the world, and is determined by actual capacities rather than abstract concepts.
As extensions of human beings, media technologies are the externalization and amplification of human possibilities. Therefore, reflecting on the media environment is not intended to negate or reject the self, but to confirm and realize the self. Our historical situation is a fate we cannot choose, yet at the same time this fate remains something still to be completed; and only by confirming our unavoidable limitations can we truly begin to choose.
As the Islamic saying goes: “Predestination is like the sea, freedom like a small boat.” What media determine is the historical situation of human beings, the larger environment in which people can freely roam about or drift with the current; this environment limits the possibilities of free action, but at the same time it secures those possibilities. As the saying goes, “Water can carry a boat, but it can also capsize it.” If one were to escape the possibility of capsizing, one would also lose the environment that allows the boat to be carried. The more one can grasp the irresistible power of the sea, the more one may be able to gallop freely across it. And blind arrogance before the sea will, precisely, strangle human freedom.
What media ecology seeks is not to resist or conquer the sea, but to accept and follow the sea. The fantasy of trying to control destiny and master everything is itself probably also a product of some media environment (print culture). Media ecology has no ambition to transcend everything, and it even knows full well that its own doctrines and attitudes are also products of the corresponding media environment. Therefore media ecology is always a reflexive inquiry: we are constantly revealing ourselves within the object of study.
The birth of media ecology has its historical background. First of all, media ecology is also a certain reaction against modernity, and modernity originated in the age of print.
Modern thought, marked by empiricism and rationalism, is basically characterized by the “discovery of media.” By the “discovery of media” I mean that people began to realize that we can never deal with objects “directly,” and always need to go “through something” in order to reach them. Modern philosophy began in the age of Bacon and Descartes, and its first hallmark was the awareness of “methodology.” This means that we do not obtain knowledge directly from nature, but always through certain specific routes. Once people discovered the media of knowledge, the first thing they thought about was how to improve them in order to obtain knowledge more accurately and efficiently. Thereafter, suspicion toward media became inevitable—media are always real, that is to say, always historical and limited; so how can certainty be guaranteed? Some therefore tried to design an absolutely reliable medium, such as Descartes’ methodology and the formal languages of logical positivists; others simply denied that human beings can obtain knowledge of the external world.
In fact, these reactions never truly faced the necessity of mediacy as a mode of human existence. In people’s eyes, media always seem like something superfluous; people still imagine, in a fantasy, “direct” contact between a ready-made subject and a ready-made object, while media are like a ring of impenetrable walls confining “human beings” within them. So people always want to break down the walls, want media to become transparent.
Yet according to the line of thought of media ontology, such a wall never existed in the first place. Any interposition is also always a way of access, and any access is also always manifested as some form of interposition. It is not that media obstruct communication (interruption is also a form of communication), but rather that media produce communication. Media ontology truly unfolds reflection upon media as media, rather than treating media as an annoying hindrance to be eliminated.
The discovery of media is closely related to the rise of printing. The cultural environment shaped by printing established a neutral, persistent, orderly, and at-a-glance “textual world.” Print culture changed the meaning of “knowledge”: knowledge became itemized and publicized; knowledge changed from some personal capacity for insight into an objective object in “black and white” detached from any concrete individual existence, and truth became truth value.
From then on, an open academic community could finally take shape, data and conclusions could continually accumulate, and modern science could develop explosively. Yet in this objectifying culture, the importance of media was indeed brought into view: diagrams and printed type replaced natural objects as the focus of scholarly research and debate, and intermediaries such as procedures, methods, processes, and tools were brought into the open. But in this stage, the “discovery of media” remained the placing of media as object within the field of vision. Whether printers and craftsmen grinding lenses, or philosophers devoted to methodology or epistemology, people strove to decompose, revise, and polish media, but they did not enter the phenomenological attitude of reflecting on media as environment.
And with the rise of mass media—from radio and television to mobile phones and the internet—the media environment of the information age has undergone earth-shaking changes once again. In people’s lifeworlds, the layers of media have become richer and richer, to the point that people often switch back and forth between different media. Our understanding of the same thing is often carried out simultaneously through media such as television, newspapers, magazines, and the internet; and within the internet itself there are likewise different routes at the same time, such as portals, forums, microblogs, instant messaging, and so on.
This “multi-medium” media environment has made our lifeworld fragmented. For example, in the two-minute gap while waiting for a bus, I might use my smartphone to see a news item on an online forum, or even spark a debate. When we go online, we often have one website open while browsing those bits of information, all the while logged into instant messaging and ready to communicate with various different groups at any moment. Even when I am writing a paper, I am still keeping an eye on updates in my QQ, email, and Weibo.
Whether this diversification of media, and the fragmentation of life it brings about, is good or bad is something I will not discuss here for the time being. But our awareness of media has indeed changed accordingly.
I have said that taking media as environment, or rather taking media as the object of phenomenological reflection, is a dynamic state of back-and-forth switching. For example, the first “hello, hello, hello” when making a phone call marks the switch into the world of telephony. It is in these switches that the role of media as media comes into view.
And today’s multi-media environment precisely requires people to switch frequently; moving back and forth among the different worlds opened up by different media has become routine.
From ancient people being within media without being aware of it, to modern people discovering media and objectifying it, and finally to contemporary people shuttling back and forth among media, this seems to accord with some historical tendency of “thesis–antithesis–synthesis.” Correspondingly, thought and philosophy have also changed along with it, from ontology, to methodology, and then again back to ontology.
In the multi-media environment, especially in computer and Internet media, the fact that “one medium is the content of another medium” has become increasingly evident, and media’s self-presentation, or rather the phenomenon of “reflexivity,” is particularly prominent. The core idea of Turing’s computer is reflexivity: a sequence of digits is at once the result of computation and the tool of computation.
Computers vividly display media in the form of “interfaces”; the Internet, even more, fully manifests the characteristic of media as an intangible environment. Under the influence of these media environments, it is only natural that the corresponding philosophy of media would flourish as well.
Thus, media ecology was born in the environment of electronic media, and in the age of the Internet it can evoke even greater resonance.
Just like media ecology itself, every school of thought and every idea, every culture or custom, grows out of a corresponding media environment; these media environments are precisely the preconditions that make the historical twists and turns possible. In one sense, these conditions are contingent, but in another sense they are transcendental. For example, a medium that externalizes, objectifies, and stabilizes knowledge is a transcendental condition for the possibility of modern science; yet whether that medium is actually alphabetic writing and printing, or some other technology that never in fact came to be historically realized, is hard to say.
Therefore, media history can be written either as intellectual history or as social history. From the approach of intellectual history, we investigate the inner logic by which a certain idea came to be, tracing its transcendental conditions—that is, through what did this idea become possible? Of course, these so-called transcendental conditions are not fixed and motionless things suspended in an empty world of ideas; they are also concrete historical environments. “Transcendental” simply means that which comes before experience and makes experience possible. And that which comes before the experience of people within certain specific historical environments does not necessarily have to be some eternal, unchanging, motionless thing that precedes all history and all humanity. “Before” is, from the outset, and ought to be, a historical concept. Through a survey of Plato, Kant, and Stiegler, my doctoral dissertation brought transcendental philosophy toward media history, and I need not repeat that here.
From the perspective of social history, however, we do not begin from the logical structure of thought itself, but rather from changes in the social environment, examining the actual effects caused by these changes. These two approaches are not a difference between inner and outer, but merely different entry points: from the inside out, and from the outside in.
The two founding figures of media ecology, Innis and McLuhan, represent these two different angles. Innis began from economic history, focusing first on the changes in power structures and social patterns caused by transport, trade, and other economic activities. He tried to reveal how media, by affecting social structure and the ways knowledge is disseminated, ultimately influences the development of thought and knowledge. McLuhan, by contrast, first focused on human sensory experience. He tried to reveal how media, by affecting different sensory biases, determine the mode of knowledge, and of course ultimately also influence social structure and patterns of communication. In fact, social structure and modes of thought are already mutually constructive, so the two approaches of Innis and McLuhan are not contradictory but complementary.
My doctoral dissertation selected seven representative figures of the school of media ecology—Mumford, Innis, McLuhan, Ong, Eisenstein, Postman, and Levinson—for a survey. On the one hand, these figures are already recognized by the academic world as representative; on the other hand, they also interpret the media-history program I proposed from complementary angles. Among them, Mumford is a posthumously acknowledged precursor, Innis and McLuhan are the founders, Ong and Eisenstein are practitioners, while Postman and Levinson are taken as negative examples of those who went astray.
Mumford was a prolific writer, especially famous for urban history and history of technology. His 1934 Technics and Civilization provided a model for research in the history of technology.
Mumford’s significance as a precursor is not merely that he took into account the cultural influence of technology; if that were all, such media history or history of technology would still be quite weak. For example, we can see cultural histories of tea, cultural histories of spices, cultural histories of toilets, and so on. Merely placing certain technical artifacts within a cultural context is not yet enough to constitute what I call the “strong program” of media history. Mumford’s breakthrough lies in the fact that, in his writing, technology is no longer merely an object or topic within cultural history or civilization history; rather, it stands alongside civilization, making the history of “technics and civilization,” and not merely folding technology into “civilization history.” In other words, Mumford’s history of technology does not “belong to” civilization history; it “is” civilization history.
For Mumford, technology is no longer regarded merely as objective artifacts. More than the material composition of technical objects, Mumford pays attention to their intentional structure and function. And the structure of technology has from the beginning been the externalization of human intention; human culture and ways of life are preserved in technical objects, and in turn influence the transmission of culture.
The city is the memory organ of civilization; its external material structure is in fact the sedimentation of human spiritual culture, while human culture itself always grows within a transmitted vessel. This cycle of externalization and internalization interprets the historical pattern in which technology and human nature are mutually conditioning and mutually constructing.
As we have said, the key point of the “media history” I propose does not lie in making media the focal point; on the contrary, we try to pay attention to “human beings” through media. Mumford’s history of technology is precisely like this: placing human nature at the center is exactly why he can be regarded as a precursor.
What Mumford wanted to depict was “how human nature and the technical environment co-evolve.” He neither took technology as an achievement of humanity’s continuous progress, nor as the chief culprit in the fall of human nature. This is not to say that he had no value judgment of his own; plainly, he had an ideal of human nature in mind: organic, rich, free, and full of vitality. And this longing for an ideal human nature is consistent with the pursuit of an ideal technical environment (the ideal city / utopia). Whether human nature’s tendencies are good or bad, the perspective of history of technology can be applied symmetrically; history of technology can explain both the decline of human nature and the hope of human nature.
Of course, compared with later media ecologists, Mumford’s key term is technology rather than media. But this is not a particularly important issue. In fact, in McLuhan, media and technology are also more or less interchangeable. The difference lies only in the point of departure or emphasis. Relatively speaking, the concept of “technology” leans more toward pointing to visible artifacts such as clocks, cities, steam engines, and so on, whereas “media” leans more toward the question of through what visible things themselves become visible. In fact, clocks can also be regarded as “media for indicating time,” and printed books, of course, can also be regarded as “technologies of dissemination.” Whether one begins with the concept of media or with the concept of technology, the destination is ultimately the same. However, subtle differences in connotation may produce different tendencies. For example, starting from the concept of technology may more easily emphasize the question of “things,” whereas starting from the concept of media more readily highlights the question of “seeing/hearing/using/through…,” so the focus of attention more easily falls on human perceptual activity or the process of dealing with things. The guiding structure implied by media—“…through…to…” —more strongly stimulates us to attend to human finitude and relativity.
In addition, because writing and books are more typical “media,” starting from the perspective of media makes historians more likely to notice reflexive inquiry—the philosophical debates and historical writing themselves are always mediated by certain media, and writings that reveal media’s biases are themselves bound to have their own biases. In terms of reflexive investigation, Mumford’s work is not especially evident. Innis, by contrast, explicitly emphasized this point.
Innis’s contribution was not merely that he paved the way for McLuhan; compared with later media ecologists, Innis still had a distinctive theoretical significance, namely his “self-consciousness” with respect to history.
First, Innis began from economic history and emphasized the significance of material factors and transport relations for history.
Then, in a sense of the sociology of knowledge, Innis emphasized the “reflexivity” of history, reflecting on the biases of historiography itself. We have said that media-ecology research is reflexive: it reveals its own limitations. Nothing can stand outside history, and historians are no exception; they too are products of historical environments. The best attitude is not to strive desperately to eliminate “bias,” but to face up to and reflect on one’s own biases.
In Innis’s representative work The Bias of Communication, the word “bias” is used in the dual sense of history and historiography. Through reflection on their own “biases,” historians found a way to reveal the biases of an age.
Media history, as a discipline that reveals “bias,” should also be able to reveal its own “bias.” Innis’s emphasis on reflexivity is an important contribution. Of course, later figures such as McLuhan, Ong, Postman, and others also, to varying degrees, carried out the demand for reflexivity, and all had some awareness of their own context and limitations. But Innis was the most striking in this respect.
Innis’s path was later developed by McLuhan. But McLuhan was not Innis’s disciple; their points of departure and theoretical styles were quite different. Innis began from economic history and placed greater emphasis on external relations and grand structures, stressing the bias of social structure; McLuhan, by contrast, placed greater emphasis on the philosophical dimension, stressing internal acts of consciousness and the bias of sensory activities such as vision and touch. For example, when it comes to different media, Innis mainly judged their biases by their external form—whether they were portable or bulky, durable or fragile—whereas McLuhan consciously carried out phenomenological reflection, examining the biases they impose on people when they are “passed through” as media. He does not define media’s bias from the formal structure of artifacts, but from the sensory side of human beings. We have said before that these are two complementary perspectives, from the outside in and from the inside out.
McLuhan is the banner of media ecology, and he offered the fullest display of the historical vision and narrative style of media ecology. Because of his wild, freewheeling writing style, many people have overlooked McLuhan’s method. I particularly emphasize McLuhan’s interpretation of his own research method: how to take media as environment, how to enter history through media in order to explain its motivating forces, and so on. Many of the points I mentioned earlier can resonate with McLuhan.
The work of Ong and Eisenstein is both very rich, and I focused on exploring their relation to theories of the Scientific Revolution. Their work supports and supplements paradigm theory and anti-Whig history of science. The part on Ong discusses the process from orality to writing, and from the pre-paradigmatic to the paradigmatic in science; the part on Eisenstein discusses the process from writing to print, and the revolutionary process of scientific paradigms.
Under different media environments, people may have incommensurable worldviews. And understanding changes in media environments, understanding historical transformations, requires us to suspend ready-made standards and attempt to understand the chasms between different paradigms, different frameworks of thought, or different worldviews, and to try to understand lifeworlds and historical situations unlike our own.
The boundary of a paradigm is precisely the “community,” and the boundary and characteristics of a community depend on the “media environment” through which people communicate with one another within it. What paradigm theory implies is precisely that “the medium is the message”; that is to say, the communication environment peculiar to a community is more crucial than the actual content they communicate. When understanding historical development, the scientific paradigm is more crucial than specific scientific propositions.
Scientific paradigms are born from different forms of the lifeworld. In an oral world, there is no relatively independent “scientific community”; only in a culture of writing can the scientific community acquire relative independence. And it was not until the age of the printed book that a scientific community capable of lasting transmission, sharing a common language, and standing at a distance from nature truly matured. This is precisely the condition for the modern Scientific Revolution.
Using Eisenstein’s account of the rise of modern science is an instance of the media-history program. It does not strictly follow Innis or McLuhan’s path, but it does rather well demonstrate the power of this program: by taking media as media in a phenomenological attitude, examining their influence when media rise and fall and are switched back and forth, it reveals how the way modern people perceive the world corresponds to changes in the media environment.
Finally, I critically surveyed Postman and Levinson. Their applications of media ecology had some missteps. For example, Postman overlooked the positive side of children and the lived dimension of television; he overlooked media issues beyond “epistemology.” By reaffirming the basic intent of media ecology, we find that Postman and Levinson’s shortcomings are not accidental, but arise because they missed some fundamental insights, especially in taking a certain ready-made understanding of “human nature.”
Different scholars, with different styles and from different angles, have demonstrated the historiographic mode of media ecology; it is hard to summarize it clearly with any rigid model. In my doctoral dissertation, I borrowed four principles from Breuer’s strong program to resonate with several scholars, including:
Causality: tracing the conditions of history (McLuhan)
Impartiality: anti-Whig history: returning to the historical context. (Ong)
Symmetry: media environments explain both the good and the bad, without opposing human nature. (Mumford)
Reflexivity: the finitude and historicity of thought itself (Innis)
But in substance, these four principles cannot really be said to be the main content of the “media history” program I proposed. The basic intent of this media history still rests on these several concepts—media, environment, history, philosophy: media as environment, history as philosophy. That is the foothold of “media history.”
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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