“Our species’ ability to understand and respond to the planetary ecological crisis may be aided by a truly ecological media ecology, that is, by the idea that there is not just an analogical resonance between natural ecologies and media ecologies but a cosmological community. Whitehead’s panexperientialist cosmology allows us to generalize media ecology’s focus on the medium instead of the message, such that the world itself is brought into view as a medium of communication. Perhaps such an imaginative generalization of media ecology into an ecological metaphysics or metaphysics of the medium can sensitize us to the primal logos of the cosmos. […] Recognizing that humans represent only one of the cosmos’ many forms of communicative being, and that the storage, transmission, and transformation of meaning occur at every scale—from the quantum to the geological to the galactic—new theoretical perspectives on and practical interventions into the study of media as environment and environment as media open up. Becoming conscious of a communicative cosmos has profound technological, ecological, and theological implications.”

The above passage is from the introduction of an essay written by process philosopher, Matthew T. Segall, titled “Whitehead and Media Ecology: Toward a Communicative Cosmos” which was written for the journal Process Studies. It’s definitely worth a look!

I’ve been interested in media ecology for a while but have only ever really studied Marshall McLuhan and some various contemporary folks, like his famous successor, Niel Postman, and I think Matthew is right that media ecology has typically had an anthropocentric orientation. So yeah I’m happy to be reading a bit more about contemporary media ecology and very happy to see Whitehead’s philosophy of organism being utilized.

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Painting above by Boston-based artist Bethany Noël

Tags:communicationCosmologyecologyMatt Segallmedia ecologymedium messagepanexperientialismprocess philosophywhitehead