Media Ecology

Complex interactions between media, technology, and human environments, including the ways media and communication technologies affect human perception, understanding, and society
Hanna-Riikka Roine 2026-02-20

Explication

When it comes to the origins of “media ecology” as a term, philosopher Marshall McLuhan is often credited with setting out its foundations. In his 1964 book, McLuhan conceptualises media as extensions of the human sensorium, both requiring and fuelling different kinds of engagement, participation, and focus. For his part, media theorist Neil Postman is seen as the first to coin the term in his 1968 address. He defined media ecology as “the study of media environments”, as looking into “the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, and value” (“The Reformed English Curriculum”).

More recently, Matthew Fuller has outlined three different threads of media ecology. The first thread refers to the allocation of informational roles in organizations and in digital collaborative work (Fuller 3). The second thread, developed by theorists such as Postman and Friedrich Kittler, focuses on human engagements with the symbolic or cultural environment of media, drawing a distinction between the natural environment and the media environment (Postman, “The Humanism of Media Ecology” 11). Kittler, then, uses this distinction to draw out the ways in which “[m]edia determine our situation” (28), as he positions bodies and subjectivities as constituted by the media they use. That is, different media are not mere instruments we use to serve objective and rational means; rather, they configure and shape human action and meaning-making, including narrative practices.

As the third “thread of study”, Fuller (4) identifies the analysis of the ways in which literature has become a part of a subset of media, and, thus, of discursive storage, calculation, and transmission systems. N. Katherine Hayles notes that print does not exist in isolation from other media and argues that we need to understand “how media can converge into digitality and simultaneously diverge into a robust media ecology in which new media represent and are represented in old media” (32; see also Remediation). This development has not only led to differentiation of each medium’s alterity from other media, but also to a productive ecology that acts as a reciprocity between media that ensures the continued presence of older storage and communications technologies (Tabbi and Wutz 9). For narrative theorist Daniel Punday, then, the concept of the media ecology offers “a flexible understanding of the environment in which the novel functions today” (14). Reading, writing, and narratives mutate in response to the changing media ecology within which they are situated: the affordances of algorithms and platforms, for instance, have a significant effect on the form, expressions, and practices of narratives.

The current ingression of algorithms and computational logic into culture has created a need for yet another sense of media ecology. Sy Taffel (1) argues that, unlike the term “environment”, ecology does not evoke something outside of human systems. The concept of digital media ecology is, thus, committed to finding productive ways of “eliding the assumed oppositions between socially constructed human culture and the nonhuman domains of nature and technology” (2). Unsettling such dichotomies is crucial because while human culture is and has always been entangled with different nonhuman systems, we are now in the process of entering into deep symbiosis with computational media (Hayles, “Three Species Challenges” 34). As a result, the digital does not surround us “like a culture but rather like a kind of infraculture” (Lindberg and Roine 10). For Erich Hörl, the digital is “an ecology of a natural-technical continuum” (128) generated and interwoven by principles that we need to make visible and examine, while Mark B.N. Hansen describes contemporary media as “atmospheric,” implying their permeation into every aspect of human sensations and experiences.

Media ecology makes it possible for us to recognize and analyse the ways in which different media technologies sculpt not only human communication, but also culture, ways of thinking, values, and social and power relationships (see Ong; Hayles, “How We Became Posthuman”). As the development of new digital technologies, such as GenAI and LLMs, accelerates, focusing critically on such sculpting is ever more important.

Works Referenced

Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. The MIT Press, 2005.

Hansen, Mark B.N. Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media. Chicago University Press, 2015.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Three Species Challenges: Toward a General Ecology of Cognitive Assemblages.” The Ethos of Digital Environments: Technology, Literary Theory and Philosophy, edited by Susanna Lindberg and Hanna-Riikka Roine, Routledge, 2021, pp. 27–46.

Hörl, Erich. “A Thousand Ecologies: The Process of Cybernetization and General Ecology.” Translated by James Burton, Jeffrey Kirkwood, and Maria Vlotide. The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside, edited by Diedrich Diedrichsen and Anselm Franke, Sternberg, 2013, pp. 121–30.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford University Press, 1999.

Lindberg, Susanna and Hanna-Riikka Roine. “Introduction: From Solving Mechanical Dilemmas to Taking Care of Digital Ecology.” The Ethos of Digital Environments: Technology, Literary Theory and Philosophy, edited by Susanna Lindberg and Hanna-Riikka Roine, Routledge, 2021, pp. 1–21.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Ong, Walter J. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Cornell University Press, 1997.

Postman, Neil. “The Reformed English Curriculum.” High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education, edited by A.C. Eurich, Pitman, 1970, pp. 160–168.

Postman, Neil. “The Humanism of Media Ecology.” Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, vol. 1, 2000.

Punday, Daniel. Writing at the Limit: The Novel in the New Media Ecology. University of Nebraska Press, 2012.

Tabbi, Joseph and Michael Wutz (eds.). Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology. Cornell University Press, 1997.

Taffel, Sy. Digital Media Ecologies: Entanglements of Content, Code, and Hardware. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

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Roine, Hanna-Riikka. "Media Ecology." The Living Glossary of Digital Narrative, 2026. https://glossary.cdn.uib.no/terms/media-ecology

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Media Ecology

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Media Ecology

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