Rebel Academics? | Professor Lance Strate & The Media Ecologists
This past December I had the joy of visiting Fordham University and speaking at length with Professor Lance Strate. Among other things, Professor Strate is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. He’s a remarkable person with an impressive resume.
I was drawn to speak with Professor Strate for two main reasons: 1) because he was a student of Neil Postman, and is arguably the greatest contemporary proponent of Postman’s work and worldview, and 2) because of the excellent ongoing work he has done in furthering the field of Media Ecology, which I have mentioned before on this channel.
What is Media Ecology, you ask? It’s a good question! I describe Media Ecology as one of the modern world’s best kept secrets, and one of my goals with this channel is to make Media Ecology and media ecologists better known. But before trying to define Media Ecology, let’s look at who are considered seminal media ecologists, which will help us in our definition.
Some of the biggest names in Media Ecology are the thinkers that we have already looked at: Neil Postman, Hannah Arendt, Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul, as well as those we have yet to consider: Marshall McLuhan, Christopher Alexander, René Girard, among others. Each of these thinkers worked in their own academic discipline however, and were for the most part not tied together under some academic umbrella. So…what is it that binds these thinkers together?
The way I describe it is that they were all rebels within their disciplines specifically, and within academia more generally. Academia tends to reward those who go deeply into some very specific, but usually mostly irrelevant topic (at least to the vast majority of people). Those academics, however, who discover something in their research and then attempt to relate it to the life of society-at-large often find themselves on the fringes of the academic world. This is particularly the case when they seek to cross disciplines to make broader arguments about how the world works. Not all of these rebel academics are media ecologists but, as a rule, most (all?) media ecologists can be characterized as rebel academics.
I often refer to Socrates as the first famous rebel academic. Socrates was famously put to death because of the intellectual challenges he presented to the ruling Athenian power structure. Plato recounts (in his work, the Apology) the trial of his teacher Socrates who argued that while it’s easy to swat at a gadfly (an intellectual rebel), to silence one is perilous: “If you kill a man like me, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me.” Socrates argued that his role was comparable to that of the gadfly: “to sting people and to whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth.”
Media ecologists, and all of the thinkers that we look at here on this channel, are intellectual gadflies who challenge the status quo in some way. While Media Ecology has a more precise definition, it’s helpful to think of the field as a group of thinkers who, ultimately, ask profound and challenging questions about the way things are, and about the way things should be.
As you may have already noticed, I am transitioning the name of my work from You Are Not A Machine (which I will hold onto as a slogan!) to Gadfly Academy. In this way, my goal is to follow in Socrates’ tradition of questioning the cultural status quo, and pulling together the best minds who have worked, and continue to work, on the most important questions.
So…to get back to the question of a more precise definition of Media Ecology, early on in my interview with Professor Strate, I ask him to provide a definition of Media Ecology, and here is his response:
“I always go back to Neil Postman’s original definition, I think that was the best, that it was the study of media as environments. To which I add a small footnote because technically ‘media’ and ‘environments’ are synonymous. We often don’t think of them that way, but really a medium is something that surrounds and pervades us at every turn. Fish swim in the medium of water, we move through the medium of air, we see through the medium of light, and so forth. So I would say that Media Ecology is also the study of environments…well environments as media. The rooms that we’re in, the buildings that we inhabit, the structures, the cities, the streets, all of these are media that structure how we think and act and communicate and organize ourselves.”
From Professor Strate’s definition, it becomes clear: 1) Why Media Ecology is so difficult to conceptualize, and 2) Why media ecologists find themselves on the fringes of academia. Let’s look at these two points in greater depth.
Media Ecology is so difficult to conceptualize because its goal is analogous to attempting to describe water to a fish (sorry, there’s that metaphor again!) In order to understand water, the fish needs to be able to see the water. Similarly, media ecologists try to help people see the reality (and consequences) of the ubiquitous (and therefore seemingly invisible) environments in which we find ourselves. A contemporary example that Strate uses is that we live in a “smartphone environment.” Even if you don’t own a smartphone, you are affected by the billions of people around you who have smartphones, and the new environment that the presence and use of smartphones has created.
Finally, media ecologists generally find themselves on the fringes of academia because they are doing what Socrates was doing: questioning the status quo. This is particularly the case in the modern world where the status quo has been characterized by Jacques Ellul as a “total environment.” At least in Socrates’ day, he was only criticizing one (albeit important) aspect of Athenian culture, while today’s media ecologists question every aspect of, and the entire substructure of, our society.
As I’ve mentioned many times before, in order to properly understand the world that we live in, we need to understand the unseen environments and influences that affect our daily lives. The study of Media Ecology provides great insights, and we will continue to look at the work of seminal media ecologists for this reason.
I really enjoyed speaking with Professor Strate, and I hope you will enjoy my interview with him as much as I enjoyed conducting it! Stay tuned, as I will be releasing it next week…and please download The How Did We Get Here? Reading List…and I will see you again soon!