Today’s proposal defense went quite smoothly~ Thanks to all the professors for taking such good care of me~ The professors also offered quite a few suggestions, which helped me sort out the threads more clearly.
Let me add a few points here. First of all, my dissertation is of course situated within the academic circles of history of science and philosophy of technology, so I am not hoping to turn those scholars in the field of communication studies who have embraced media ecology toward the direction of history of technology. Media ecology can of course take root and flourish within communication studies, but what I am stressing is that it must not be confined there. My task is to channel the tradition of media ecology into the field of philosophy of technology, but I do not intend to cut off its flow in communication studies.
In addition, “interpreting media ecology from the perspective of philosophy of technology” is indeed not a final title, but merely a research “theme,” a line of inquiry. I understand the so-called “topic proposal” as meaning the theme rather than the title, right? As for what final title to give it, that still needs to be considered and designed. This sentence may perhaps serve as a subtitle for now. As for the main title, I have thought of something like “The Ontological Program of Media History” or “The Strong Program of Media History.”
I position media ecology as a program for the history of technology, but such a historiographical program can also vary in breadth and strength. On the one hand, the scope of “historiography” can be understood narrowly or broadly. In the narrow sense, history is the study of human civilization; in the broad sense, history includes the original meaning of “history” in English: any inquiry conducted empirically, through actual investigation, observation, and description, can be counted as “historiography.” Thus sociology, anthropology, or cultural studies of the contemporary present can all be counted within the scope of historiography. On the other hand, the scope of application of the concept of “media” can be either stronger or weaker. A weak program is to write the history of technology by treating media technologies as the most important or most dominant among all technologies—for instance, I regard the printing press as more important than the steam engine. A strong program, by contrast, treats all technologies as media, including steam engines, hammers, clocks, social institutions, and so on, all of which belong to the category of “media.” This also means that even a hammer is a kind of communication medium, or rather an intermediary of communication (the phrase “communication medium” is a bit awkward in Chinese; actually, communication is just communication), and therefore it also possesses “information patterns” and “communication codes.”
That is to say, in the “official” definition of media ecology that I mentioned in the previous article, the separator between “technology and skill” on the one hand and “information patterns and communication codes” on the other can, according to the weak program, be understood as “technology and skill, especially information patterns and communication codes”; whereas according to the strong program, it can be understood as “technology and skill, or rather information patterns and communication codes.”
In fact, this strong program is not at all novel. On the one hand, Heidegger emphasizes that human beings are always in dwellings, and on the other hand, he emphasizes that human beings are always being-with others; this already implies a way of thinking that treats ordinary tools as one kind of medium. Moreover, the word “code” is my translation of code, and we are immediately reminded of Feenberg’s concept of “technical code.” When I was an undergraduate reading Feenberg, I found this “code” hard to grasp, but now I understand: isn’t this just a version of “the medium is the message”? What Feenberg is saying is precisely that every technology carries a certain code; that is to say, beyond performing a specific task, the use and dissemination of a technology are at the same time the transmission of certain information and participation in actual human social interaction, and this information is encoded within the technology.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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