Site of the Week Archive:
Great links to 4+ years of
media literacy education-related Sites of the Week

“Media ecology looks into ... how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival.”
Neil Postman

"Media ecologists are interested in the interactions of communications media, technology, technique, and processes, with human feeling, thought, value, and behavior."
Christine Nystrom

How does media (both the technology and the messages) affect us as individuals, families, cultures, nations and as inhabitants of planet Earth? Traditional K-12 media education doesn't address that question much, and popular culture tends to glorify media for its very existence.

The answer: nobody really knows how media affect us. Media consumers are guinea pigs in a global experiment that nobody's in charge of. Our bodies aren't made for sitting in front of a television all day. Our eyes aren't used to looking at radiant light screens for hours at a time. Our brains don't have built-in protection from cellphone radiation.

Our family, work and cultural systems struggle to maintain their health against the seductive charms of media. In the past 60 years, the world has become a vastly different place than it was in the previous hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, and we don't know if that's a good thing or not.

Who's talking about these issues? In the late 1970's, Jerry Mander's book “The Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” provided a wake-up call. (Academic researchers have heavily  criticized Mander's use of data and his assumptions, but his overall questions and concerns remain valid.) The late Neil Postman was renowned for his insights on living with media, and he was instrumental in developing the Media Ecology graduate program at NYU. Bill McKibben, a thoughtful and articulate writer, has also asked profound and important questions about media in our lives.

Large corporations are interested in human interaction with media because their profits are linked to how successfully their advertising can make us buy their products. Check out this project by The Advertising Research Foundation (now a few years back) which  will "develop an understanding of and ways to measure the emotional response to advertising...." The advertising industry spends millions to find out how people react to media, to learn how to better persuade (many would say manipulate) people to act on the media mesage (i.e., buy the product) .

Check out these organizations, online resources and books on these subjects.

Academic Resources, Organizations and Programs

The NYU Department of Culture and Communications in its Steinhardt School of Education offers Masters and Doctoral programs for studying 'transactions among people, their messages, and their message systems."

Sage Publishing has numerous academic resources on Communications and Media Studies.

The Media Ecology Association (MEA) is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting the study, research, criticism, and application of media ecology in educational, industry, political, civic, social, cultural, and artistic contexts."

Integrated Media Systems Center, University of Southern California
USC, with its proximity to Hollywood film studios, is well-known for its advanced programs in multi-media. “The Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) seeks to advance the integration of digital video, audio, text, animation and graphics to dramatically transform the way we work, communicate, learn, teach, entertain and play.... The Center is taking multimedia to a new level of technological sophistication.”  I think it's worth knowing about those who assume that using media to "dramatically transform the way we work, communicate, learn, teach, entertain and play" is automatically a good thing, when we don't really know if it is or not.

Media, Tourism, Environment and Cultural Issues in Australia
Conducted in conjunction with the University of New South Wales, with American academic staff also serving as program faculty, the program seeks to provide an overview of Australia's media and examine its role in reporting public affairs, natural resources, and the environment.

Other Online Resources

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Author Robert D. Putnam "shows how changes in work, family structure, age, suburban life, television, computers, women's roles and other factors" have contributed to the decline of "social capital" in U.S. society.

Center for SCREEN-TIME Awareness (formerly TV Turn-Off Network) provides information so people can live healthier lives in functional families in vibrant communities by taking control of the electronic media in their lives, not allowing it to control them.

A Model Media Ecologist - a blog by Bob Blechman. Musings on technology and culture by a disciple of Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Blechman has held senior technology positions in medicine, education, publishing and broadcast TV. He has a Ph.D. in Media Ecology (Communication Theory and Media Studies) and a Finance MBA, both from New York University. His doctoral research concerned the impact of television advertising on our culture.

Book List

Note: Many of these authors have been criticized by researchers and academic professionals on the grounds that the authors' stated positions are not substantiated by traditional scientific research methods (e.g., double-blind studies, multiple studies on large random samples, etc.). Jerry Mander made the point that the rise of technology has caused people to doubt what they already know to be true unless a study “proves” it to be correct. These writers may not be able to prove every point they make, however, they are asking important questions that deserve to be heard and need to be answered.

Jerry Mander: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television; In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations.
Bill McKibben: The Age of Missing Information
Roderick Hart: Seducing America: How Television Charms the Modern Voter
Neil Postman:  Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business ; Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology ; Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future ; The Disappearance of Childhood ; Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology, and Education.
Jane Healy: Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think And What We Can Do About It ; Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds--for Better and Worse.
Clay Calvert : Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture

Academic Books
Sonia Livingstone (Editor), Moira Bovill (Editor) Children and Their Changing Media Environment: A European Comparative Study
Dorothy G. Singer , Jerome L. Singer  Handbook of Children and the Media
Sandra L. Calvert (Editor), Amy B. Jordan (Editor), Rodney R. Cocking (Editor)  Children in the Digital Age: The Role of Entertainment Technologies in Children's Development
Jennings Bryant , Dolf Zillmann: Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research
Mark Andrejevic: Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched



Thank you to William Van Vechten for research assistance for this page.