I’m currently reading a fascinating book by renowned media ecologist Neil Postman, which is called Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993). In the text, Postman explains how technology has come to rule our lives, business and social institutions. We have made the shift from tool-using cultures, to technocracies and finally to technopolies.

A particular point that has leapt out at me is how he describes the transformation of information. The direct quote below is incredibly relevant to today, particularly considering the fact that it was written well before the rise of today’s dominant social media platforms.

Check this out: ‘Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems. To say it yet another way: The milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e. information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose’ (Postman, 1993, pp. 69–71).

This perfectly describes platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube; information and content just keeps flowing… and for what? What does it all mean? It’s impossible to actually consume everything.

To me, services like Micro.blog do not yet fall into this category of informational garbage, nor do podcasts, for which I only have a limited number of feeds. For those who thrive in these spaces (both as producers and consumers), however, it will be important not to overload and repeat the mistakes of the very recent past. Let’s stay focused and meaningful in our online behaviour.

Wooo! I finally finished reading Mapping Media Ecology: Introduction to the Field, which is a comprehensive text on the history, purpose and contributions of media ecology as a ‘metadiscipline’. Whilst I found a variety of references for my initial thesis proposal, I felt that it was important to tackle the what, how and why of the field. There are so many specific texts, heuristics and research approaches from numerous scholars that it wouldn’t have made sense to dive into journals and essays without getting a grip on the terminology first. It took me forever to write down copious notes but I now have the base knowledge to continue. (So far, Ulysses has been an invaluable tool for building my notes in Markdown and adding keywords. I hope that it will make it easier to track things over time.)