In my writing about media, I’ve been using the words “ecology” and “ecosystem” fairly liberally (for instance, here). In a new piece called “The Limitations of the ‘News Ecosystem’ Metaphor,” The Columbia Journalism Review’s Lauren Harris argues that this metaphor is misguided. She interviews media scholar Anthony Nadler, who has claimed that the metaphor “naturaliz[es] current trends in the diffusion and development of news practices.” Its use “suggests ‘spontaneous, self-ordering principles’ in the news market obscuring all the social, political, and economic decisions that undergird the status quo.”
I want to respond to that argument here.
The argument is not a new one; some version of it has plagued the field of “media ecology” for as long as that field has existed (which it has, as a kind of interdisciplinary interloper into media studies scholarship since the early 1970s). Debates over the aptness of the metaphor have only intensified as an ecologically oriented media scholarship has grown.
The problem, as I see it, is not so much with the word “ecology” as it is with its popular connotations. Nadler essentially admits this in his interview, where he describes the metaphor of a media ecosystem as “invit[ing] us to think of the system as a bunch of individual actors competing” in a “survival of the fittest” struggle that leads, of its own accord, to “growth” and “flourishing.” This slippage between competitive individualism and a kind of symbiotic holism, in his analysis, makes it difficult to see the social, political, and economic decisions and norms that shape media today.
Whether popular thinking really reflects that understanding of “ecology” is not clear to me. The word is used in a wide variety of scholarly contexts — some of them biological, but others sociological (“human ecology”), psychological (“ecological perception,” which I wrote about recently), and even linguistic and economic. Some of its popular uses remain conditioned by the competitivism of classical Darwinian accounts of life, while others are more influenced by the holism of Gaia theory or the do-goodism of environmental virtuosity, where “ecology” acts as a signifier of “harmony” with scarcely a hint of competition or struggle.
Using the word today should reflect not only those popular connotations, but also contemporary ecological science, which is complex and not so easy to pigeonhole. Ecosystems, when they can even be identified as such, work in nonlinear ways. They do not always, and maybe not ever, attain the once-and-for-all stability of a “climax community.” Ecosystems are in this sense “non-teleological“: while they may reflect emergent, systemic features, they aren’t directed toward a specific end goal. It’s therefore unwarranted to presume that an economic system treated as “ecological” would be one where competition led “naturally” to the maximum flourishing of the whole.
Ecosystems are made up of individuals doing their own thing, and while some of that “doing” looks like competition, other parts of it look more cooperative or symbiotic, even mutualistic. Most are simply statistical and emergent: what happens is a result of things settling into emergent patterns that find relative zones of stability punctuated by change and characterized by inherent dynamism. Reading social-Darwinist or neoliberal economic values into ecology is of course possible, but so is reading Kropotkinite anarchism, chaos theory, and almost anything else.
If there is an essence to ecology — or even just a “center of gravity” within the “family resemblances” among the “language games” the word features in — it arguably has something to do with relational networks or ensembles that, from an analytical perspective, are worth considering as (more or less) systemic unities. Things interact to create modelable wholes. Scientifically speaking, the “modelable” part is probably key: if you can’t model it, then you can’t really treat it as a system.
That’s how I think of the word when I use it, including in my work on three ecologies. And in that respect, I think it’s quite defensible. That said, Nadler’s point about social, political, and economic decisions and norms is very important for understanding the “ecology of media.” They are, in fact, part of that ecology, not outside of it.
What’s more important, for the rendition of media ecology that I develop in my work, is that the media ecology that Nadler and other media scholars are describing is part of a broader media ecology that is the world in general. Just as “the economy” is part of a larger “ecology,” as the field of ecological economics has argued for years, so “the media” are part of a larger world that is itself mediated and mediatic.
The technological systems we call “media” are extensions and transformers of how we perceive and respond to the world, a world that already includes political actors, social understandings, economic incentives, contractual agreements, design principles, and much more. Those media are a subset of the broader category of media, which (in my rendition) are the technical, perceptual, and bodily modalities by which all things interact with other things. “Media” is simply a word for “mediating apparatuses,” which mediate via the shaping of perceptual and responsive capacities. Mediation is how things work.
We can focus on what the things take themselves to be (i.e., on their autopoiesis or automorphism, which add up to “social ecologies” of “I’s” and “you’s” and “us’s” and “them’s”), or on the things themselves in their measurable dimensions (i.e., their “material ecologies”). But if we ignore the mediatic relations by which they become, continually, then we won’t have a clear understanding of how they work. It just so happens that in our current human case that mediation takes place through complex technological systems, but there’s nothing teleological, preordained, or ontologically privileged and privileging about that.
In this sense, “media ecology” is not just a metaphor imported from biology into a human, social, political, or technological domain. Media ecology is constitutive of that biological world as well. Where Nadler suggests the metaphor of a “built environment” is more useful for understanding media, I am suggesting that it works the other way, too: media constitute ecosystems and environments built by their constituent members, but so does biology itself. Both conceptions — of media and of biology — are radically constructivist in that both are understood to be constituted by the actions and processes that make them up.
Or, the metaphor is the Zone it is describing.
