On Media Ecology Books and Book Series

In my previous post, A Good Causality, I neglected to mention that our new co-edited anthology, Taking Up McLuhan's Cause: Perspectives on Media and Formal Causality, was published as part of the UK publisher Intellect's new book series on media ecology, which is being edited by my friend and fellow media ecologist Phil Rose. 

This represents the third book series devoted to the field of media ecology to have been launched. The first one, which I proposed and was supervisory editor for, came courtesy of Hampton Press, back circa 1994-1995. After publishing many books in the series for well over a decade, Hampton decided to stop publishing new books of any kind, the owner was essentially retiring, so although the books that were published would continue to be sold, this essentially brought the series to a close.

For several years, there was no active book series devoted to media ecology, and I have to credit Phil Rose for the push to find a new publisher to start one up. It was at his urging that, following the successful publication of Amazing Ourselves to Death, that I proposed a new book series to my publisher, Peter Lang, which was accepted with the title, "Understanding Media Ecology" (that's a title I was going to use for a book of my own, but Peter Lang wanted to distinguish the new series from the old Hampton Press series, and like that title, so I gave it up).

So far, three books have been published in the Peter Lang Series: the second edition of Bob Logan's Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan; Bob's collaboration with Marshall McLuhan that had never been published, with additional material updating it for the contemporary media environment, The Future of the Library: From Electric Media to Digital Media; and Dennis Cali's attempt to produce a media ecology textbook, Mapping Media Ecology: An Introduction to the Field.

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The next book in the series is one that is very near and dear to my heart, and is already listed for pre-order:

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But more on that when the time comes...

In the meantime, as I mentioned, Phil Rose was also able to successfully propose a new media ecology series for Intellect, and Taking Up McLuhan's Cause was the first book published in the series, and hard on its heals was another anthology, this one edited by Phil, entitled Confronting Technopoly: Charting a Course Towards Human Survival. The term technopoly was coined by Neil Postman, and the book follows up on his major media ecological work, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.

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As you can see, this second offering from Intellect is also, unfortunately, only available in hardcover, and priced for library sales. In any event, here is the blurb describing the collection:

In 1992, Neil Postman presciently coined the term “technopoly” to refer to “the surrender of culture to technology.” This book brings together a number of contributors from different disciplinary perspectives to analyze technopoly both as a concept and as it is seen and understood in contemporary society. Contributors present both analysis of and strategies for managing socio-technical conflict, and they also open up a number of fruitful new lines of thought around emerging technological, social, and even psychological forms.

And here are the contents (you'll probably notice a familiar name early on):

Introduction: The Question Concerning Technopoly
Phil Rose 

Part I: Contextualization 

Chapter 1: Contextualizing Technopoly
Lance Strate 

Part II: Digital Manifestations  

Chapter 2: The Omnipresent Opiate: Rethinking Internet Addiction in the Network Era
Ryan S. Eanes 

Chapter 3: Probing the Media Ecology of Self-Tracking Technologies:  A Postmanist Critique and Defence
Yoni Van Den Eede 

Chapter 4: Navigating the Mobile Village
Zack Stiegler and Nick Artman 

Chapter 5: Insolent Networks: The Auto-Mated Social Life
Gary Kenton 

Part III: Ideology and Geopolitical Considerations  

Chapter 6: Striking Symbols: Re-Sounding Words from Leonard Cohen to Neil Postman
Ruthanne Wrobel 

Chapter 7: Jane, Stop This Crazy Thing! The End of Progress and the Beginning of a Third Way
Arthur W. Hunt III 

Chapter 8: Divinizing Technology and Violence: Technopoly, the Warfare State, and the Revolution in Military Affairs
Phil Rose 

Chapter 9: Posthuman Postmanism: Confronting Technopoly with Deep Media Ecology
Niall Stephens 

Part IV: Confrontations: From Education to Liberation  

Chapter 10: Postman’s Hope: Rethinking the Role of Education in Technopoly
Ellen Rose 

Chapter 11: The New Social Media Curriculum: Confronting Technopoly with Education
Geraldine E. Forsberg 

Chapter 12: Black Mountain College: Experiments in Form
Michael Plugh 

Chapter 13: The Arts of Liberation in the Age of Technopoly
Edward E. Tywoniak

A very nice collection of work indeed, and an important addition to the media ecology literature. It may be too much for most folks to buy, but again, maybe you can beg, borrow, or steal a copy!

Merchant of Verses

Back in May, I had the opportunity to attend the annual Convention of the American Library Association, in my capacity as a member of Fordham University's Library Committee, which was a truly marvelous experience, and very educational indeed.  I actually joined the ALA, at the time to get a discount on the registration fee, but I have to say that I'm glad I did, and plan to maintain my membership in the future.

One of the amazing events to take place at this convention was a private concert by Natalie Merchant, whose music I have been a great admirer of for some time now.  It was an absolutely outstanding experience, and what made it particularly interesting was the fact that Merchant had recently released an album with songs based on poetry (I missed the fact of the CD's release earlier, but hey, I'm just not on top of these things anymore).  Here's a PBS Newshour segment about the CD:


 


At the ALA, along with her performance of selections from the album, she gave brief background biographies of the poets, showed pictures of them on the big screens set up for her (let me emphasize that this was a ballroom set up for lectures, not a large auditorium or concert hall, and I was seated about eight rows away from the stage!), and acknowledged all of the different libraries that helped her in obtaining background information or images.  It was a little funny for me, not being a librarian, to be on the receiving end of her thank yous directed at the librarians, but I found it altogether touching and gracious.  And as you no doubt know, if you've been following me a bit, poetry has been one of my enthusiasms in recent years, so this really resonated with me.

Here are some photos of the performance, courtesy of the ALA:

I just fell in love with the music, and of course, I've since bought the CD,  Leave Your Sleep, which comes with a lovely booklet, and I highly recommend it to you, both for the music, which is varied and wonderful, and for the poetry.  The poetry is childhood-oriented, and includes selections by e. e. cummings, Edward Lear, Ogden Nash, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Robert Graves.  It also includes The Blindmen and the Elephant by John Godfrey Saxe, a poem favored by folks attuned to general semantics, for its expression of the ways in which different people abstract different details from the exact same phenomenon.  And it includes Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit poet that was the subject of Walter Ong's MA thesis, and whose notions of sprung rhythm has been of interest to media ecology scholars.  I also found The Janitor's Boy by Nathalia Crane to be irresistible, not the least for its mentions of Sheepshead Bay, which is in Brooklyn, and an unlikely location for a dessert isle:





That was from a performance in Portland.  I also got a kick out of The Dancing Bear, from a poem by Albert Paine, that's set to Klezmer music.  This video comes from Scottish radio:





And here's a video, in two parts, of Natalie Merchant performing selections from the CD live on BBC Radio this past February.  The sound quality is excellent, but there's not much of her explanations of the background of the pieces, which I very much enjoyed at ALA.








But leave it to good old TED to provide a video that comes the closest to the performance I saw at ALA:





When I got back from the ALA meeting in Washington, DC, I enjoyed talking about what a privilege it was to be there for Natalie Merchant's performance.  But I was surprised to learn that some of the folks I spoke to didn't recognize her name, although after some prompting it was clear that they had heard her music, especially the "thank you" song.  But my favorite of her hits is "Wonder" which doesn't seem to have a video on YouTube, except for live performances, but I rather liked this fan-produced contribution by Sue Shanahan, which is subtitled Girl's Self-Esteem--Down Syndrome:





Yeah, I kinda get teary-eyed, I can't help it, I'm an easy touch, I admit, and this hits very close to home with my own experiences with my daughter's autism.

Anyway, Merchant ended her ALA performance by coming back out for an encore, which in and of itself was awesome, and performing her best known song, "Kind and Generous" (that's the "thank you song").  So, I'm going to end with the video for that one, but I want to direct it back to the singer herself:





Thank YOU, Natalie!