page_title: Media ecology
section_title: Marshall McLuhan
hierarchical_section_title: Media ecology / Background / Marshall McLuhan
caption_attribution_description: English: Marshall McLuhan.
context_page_description: Media ecology theory is the study of media, technology, and communication and how they affect human environments. The theoretical concepts were proposed by Marshall McLuhan in 1964, while the term media ecology was first formally introduced by Marshall McLuhan in 1962.
  Ecology in this context refers to the environment in which the medium is used – what they are and how they affect society. Neil Postman states, "if in biology a 'medium' is something in which a bacterial culture grows, in media ecology, the medium is 'a technology within which a [human] 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. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people. An environment is, after all, a complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving."
  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.
context_section_description: In 1934, Marshall McLuhan enrolled as a student at Cambridge University, a school which pioneered modern literary criticism. During his studies at Cambridge, he became acquainted with one of his professors, I.A. Richards, a distinguished English professor, who would inspire McLuhan's later scholarly works. McLuhan admired Richards' approach to the critical view that English studies are themselves nothing but a study of the process of communication. Richards believed that "words won't stay put and almost all verbal constructions are highly ambiguous". 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.  
  McLuhan used the approaches of Richards, William Empson, and Harold Innis as an "entrée to the study of media". However, it took many years of work before he was able to successfully fulfill their approaches. McLuhan determined that "if words were ambiguous and best studied not in terms of their 'content' but in terms of their effects in a given context and if the effects were often subliminal, the same might be true of other human artifacts, the wheel, the printing press, the telegraph and the TV". This led to the emergence of his ideas on media ecology.
  In addition to his scholarly work, McLuhan was also a well known media personality of his day. He appeared on television shows, in magazine articles, and even had a small cameo in the movie Annie Hall.
  Few theories receive the kind of household recognition that media ecology received, due directly to McLuhan's role as a pop culture icon. He was an excellent debater and public speaker, but his writing was not always what would normally pass in academia.
caption: Marshall McLuhan, c. 1936.
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