Media Ecology: Some Details Regarding My New Book

So, if you know me personally, or connect to me via Twitter, Facebook, or the Media Ecology Association's discussion list, this may not be news to you, but it's time to make the announcement here on Blog Time Passing, my official blog of record. And even if you have already got the message, I'll add some extra details that may make it worthwhile sticking around.

So here goes, drum roll and trumpets please: My new book, Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition (New York: Peter Lang, 2017) is now in print and available for sale through Amazon and many other fine booksellers. Hurray!!!

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And here's the publisher's write-up of the book, a bit of promotional hyperbole there, but still it will give you an idea of what it's about, in case that's not entirely clear:

Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition provides a long-awaited and much anticipated introduction to media ecology, a field of inquiry defined as the study of media as environments. Lance Strate presents a clear and concise explanation of an intellectual tradition concerned with much more than understanding media, but rather with understanding the conditions that shape us as human beings, drive human history, and determine the prospects for our survival as a species.

Much more than a summary, this book represents a new synthesis that moves the field forward in a manner that is both unique and unprecedented, and simultaneously grounded in an unparalleled grasp of media ecology's intellectual foundations and its relation to other disciplines. Taking as its subject matter "life, the universe, and everything," Strate describes the field as interdisciplinary and communication-centered, provides a detailed explication of McLuhan's famous aphorism, "the medium is the message," and explains that the human condition can only be understood in the context of our biophysical, technological, and symbolic environments.

Strate provides an in-depth examination of media ecology's four key terms: medium, which is defined in much broader terms than in other fields; bias, which refers to tendencies inherent in materials and methods; effects, which are best understood via the Aristotelian notion of formal causality and contemporary systems theory; and environment, which includes the distinctions between the oral, chirographic, typographic, and electronic media environments. A chapter on tools serves as a guide to further media ecological research and scholarship. This book is well suited for graduate and undergraduate courses on communication theory and philosophy.

And you gotta have blurbs, so here are mine (and I really do appreciate them, thank you Julie, Paul, and Josh!):

With characteristic passion and soulfulness, Lance Strate embarks on a metatask: to synthesize thinking about ‘life, the universe and everything’ through the lens of media ecology. In the process, he locates media ecology as the dynamic shift between figure and ground and as the basis for ‘understanding the human condition.’ Writing with an almost disarming ease that belies the complexity of the ideas he communicates, Strate brilliantly and reflexively mediates media ecology itself, bringing clarity to the Kekulé-like conundrums of an immense and increasingly relevant field. Anyone who thoughtfully enters and engages the environment of Strate’s book will be rewarded with moments of profound clarity, connecting ideas typically viewed as disparate or oppositional into patterns of deep understanding about media ecology―and about the process of living.―Julianne H. Newton, Professor of Visual Communication, University of Oregon 

Lance Strate’s synthetic thinking in Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition opens up media ecology, allowing the reader to see how, as a field of inquiry, it applies to everything from language, media, and philosophy to our very understanding of what it means to be human living in a dynamic environment. Along the way Strate shows how media ecology connects with all the major approaches to communication study.―Paul Soukup, Professor and Chair, Department of Communication, Santa Clara University

Lance Strate asks big questions―and provides a myriad of perceptive answers. This book is at once playful, poetic, and precise. The clear writing about complex ideas is a pleasure to read and offers many gifts of understanding.―Joshua Meyrowitz, University of New Hampshire

And let me tell you about the cover. The publisher asked if I had  any instructions for the graphics designer, and I did have some ideas. One was the color, violet, like the color of the cover of Hannah Arendt's most influential philosophical work, The Human Condition:

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While the color isn't exactly the same, it does evoke Arendt's work, and her understanding of the human condition serves as a foundation for my own media ecological discussion of the conditions of human life, which is another way of saying the environments that shape and are shaped by our species. 

As an added bonus, violet also has a connection to New York University, home of the original, late lamented Media Ecology Program founded by Neil Postman and Terry Moran, who were soon joined by Christine Nystrom. While NYU's colors are purple and white, their athletic teams are called the Violets, and according to the Wikipedia entry on the NYU Violets, 

For more than a century, NYU athletes have worn violet and white colors in competition, which is the root of the nickname Violets. In the 1980s, after briefly using a student dressed as a violet for a mascot, the school instead adopted the bobcat as its mascot, from the abbreviation then being used by NYU's Bobst Library computerized catalog.

Additionally, for a period of time, I would join Postman, Nystrom, and others for lunch or a snack at an NYU eatery called The Violet. But I should also note that the way the colors turned out in different shades, the cover also offers a hint of Fordham University's school colors, maroon and white. Again, however, my main goal was to pay homage to Hannah Arendt.

In addition to the color scheme, the use of the three internally tangential circles follows one of the main diagrams included in the book, one depicting the three basic human conditions or media environments (the biophysical as the outer ring, the technological inside of it, and the symbolic as the inner ring; I used internally tangential circles rather than concentric circles because I wanted a point of intersection between the three, rather than having the symbolic fully cut off and separated from the biophysical by being surrounded by the technological, because there is direct interaction between the biophysical and the symbolic).

The way the three circles are arranged is also meant to evoke another book cover, one of the many editions of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, the most commonly cited work in the field of media ecology, and in many ways the work most central to it. The edition in question was one of the old pocketbook-sized paperback editions, with an image of a light bulb done up in Christmas-like colors:

I should note at this juncture that the original title I had in mind for this book was Understanding Media Ecology, and that goes back some two decades. But when I agreed to launch a new media ecology book series with the publisher Peter Lang,  they wanted a name for the series that would distinguish it from the Media Ecology series I had with Hampton Press, and I tossed out a few possibilities including Understanding Media Ecology, and that was the one they wanted to go with. So this book is, in fact, Volume 1 of Peter Lang's Understanding Media Ecology book series (this despite the fact that several books were published in the series prior to mine, a decision I had nothing to do with I hasten to add).

So I gave up my direct allusion to McLuhan's main work, and decided to go with a simpler and more direct title, Media Ecology. As for the subtitle, I use approach because it avoids the visual metaphor of perspective or even theory, as McLuhan and other media ecologists have been critical of the visualism of western culture, favoring acoustic metaphors instead; I also used this term because I wanted to place a certain degree of emphasis on media ecology as a method or way of understanding, a path, or tao if you like, and not just a field or intellectual tradition or set of theories. 

I did retrieve understanding in the subtitle to retain a connection to Understanding Media. And I had it read, An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition, to indicate the connection to Arendt, but also and perhaps more importantly to emphasize the fact that media ecology is about much more than media as the term is commonly understood. Indeed, media ecology is very much about the human condition, about the conditions that we exist within, that influence us, and are in turn influenced by us. Or to invoke Douglas Adams, as I do in the book, it's about life, the universe, and everything.

But back to what I was saying about the graphic design: I also suggested having the circles take up all or most of the front cover, and given their relative lengths, having my name in the innermost and smallest circle, having the book title in the middle circle, and having the rather longish subtitle in the outermost and largest circle. So, that was my input, and I am very, very pleased with the way it turned out. It's rather striking, don't you think?

Now, maybe you'd like to know a little more about the book before going ahead and buying it? To which, I respond, what's the matter, don't you trust me? But sure, I understand, so let's start with the book's own listings:

Does that help a bit? Maybe a little, but I bet a more detailed listing of the contents would be even better. I actually wanted to include a Table of Contents that included the breakdown by sections within each chapter, which I decided to number, following the example of Lewis Mumford in many of his books, but the publisher just went with the one I showed you above. (I have also incorporated the List of Illustrations here, which does appear in the book, and which are numbered according to their requirements, based on chapter number and order within the chapter.) What follows does not include the page numbers, since it was produced with the manuscript, before it went into page layout, but I think it will help provide more of a sense of what's in the book:

Contents

Illustrations

Figure 4.1 The Three Human Conditions/Media Environments
Figure 7.1 A Model of Communication Based on Formal Cause
Figure 8.1 The Ziggurat Model of the Oral Media Environment
Figure 8.2 The Ziggurat Model of the Chirographic Media Environment
Figure 8.3 The Ziggurat Model of the Typographic Media Environment
Figure 8.4 The Ziggurat Model of the Electronic Media Environment
Figure 8.5 The Alternate Ziggurat Model of the Electronic Media Environment
Figure 9.1 Pathways for Media Ecology Scholarship

Preface
 1: A First Word

Chapter 1   An Introduction
 1: Life, the Universe, and Everything
 2: Defining Media Ecology
 3: The Study and the Object of Study
 4: Field of Inquiry, Field of Study

Chapter 2   Intersections
 1: The Field of Communication
 2: Grammar, Linguistics, Semiotics, Aesthetics, Etc.
 3: General Semantics
 4: Information, Cybernetics, and Systems
 5: Media and Society
 6: Medium Theory
 7: Media Studies and Cultural Studies
 8: Human Ecology
 9: Psychology and Biology
10: Science and Technology Studies
11: History and Historiography
12: Futurology
13: Media Education and Media Literacy
14: Philosophy and Theology
15: Formalism and Materialities
16: Humanism
17: Technological Determinism
18: Praxis and Activism

Chapter 3   Understanding Media Ecology
 1: What Is Media Ecology?
 2: The Medium is the Message

Chapter 4   The Human Condition
 1: The Human Medium
 2: Nature and Culture
 3: The Technological Condition
 4: The Symbolic World

Chapter 5   Medium
 1: Understanding Media
 2: Media and Medium (A Note on Usage)
 3: From Printing to Mass Communication
 4: Transportation and Transmission
 5: Mediated Communication, New Media, Social Media
 6: Substance and Sensation
 7: Words
 8. Form
 9: Human Bodies as Media
10: Relationship
11: Technology and Technique
12: Environment and Process
13: Summation

Chapter 6   Bias
 1: The Bias of Communication
 2: The Nature of Bias
 3: The Myth of Neutrality
 4: Design and Function
 5: The Bias of the Medium

Chapter 7    Effects
 1: An Effects Tradition
 2: Impact and Ecology
 3: Some Basics Regarding Science and the Limits of Knowledge
 4: Causality
 5: Formal Cause
 6: Systems and Emergence

Chapter 8   Environment
 1: Me and Not-Me
 2: Ecosystems and Networks
 3: Towards a Media Eco-Logic
 4: Media Environments

Chapter 9   Tools
 1: Context Analysis
 2: Studying Media as Media
 3: Studying the Biases of a Medium
 4: Studying Effects
 5: Studying Environments

Chapter 10   Conclusion
 1: A Last Word

Index

And while I didn't get my author's copies of the book until later, according to Amazon, the book was officially published on the Fourth of July. So I guess you could say it represents an Independence Day of sorts, maybe in some ways for media ecology, certainly for me. What I mean is that, over the years, I have encounter many misunderstandings about media ecology, as well as a number of objections to various aspects of our field, and the book incorporates my responses to those misunderstandings and objections, and hopefully answers them in a way that might put them to rest (probably not, given that it's hard to change people's minds, even in the face of rational argument and evidence, but hope springs eternal). So, along with being a summary and new synthesis intended to move the field forward, it should also serve as a defense against the dark arts that have been aligned against media ecology over the years.

I do feel a certain sense of obligation to my mentors, Neil Postman and Christine Nystrom, and especially to Chris who tried her best to present media ecology as a coherent and organized field, rather than simply a series of probes and percepts. And in that sense, this was a book that I needed to write. I kinda had the feeling that if I died before this book was completed, my shade would not be able to rest easy. Which is also why the book is by no means all that it could be, because I had to limit what I would cover and the amount of time I would put into it, or the book would never have been finished (not to mention that I had word count limits imposed by the publisher, which I significantly exceeded). But with this book, I do believe I have fulfilled the obligation that I felt to Chris and Neil (an obligation that they never placed on me I hasten to add), as well as to my colleagues, students, friend, and fellow travelers, to media ecologists present and future. Whew!

Swimming Up Mainstream

So, I had an interesting exchange with Andrew Hoskins, a professor at the University of Glasgow, based on my quotes in the New York Times, as discussed in my recent blog post, How Netflix Is Deepening Our Cultural Echo Chambers. 

Andrew is currently working on a book about news and the concept of the "mainstream" and how that ideal or myth or sociological reality (take your pick, or view it as some combination of all three) might relate to changes in the media environment. As he put it, "You are spot on when you say that broadcast TV at its height served very significant social, cultural and political roles, but I wonder then to what extent its absence/demise today has shaped the current crisis in faith in the ‘mainstream’?"

Here now is my response, with a bit of editing to make it suitable for Blog Time Passing readers:

I think it might be fruitful to trace the idea of the mainstream back to that of the public. At the start of The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan states that the public was a product of printing. And I think that when you look at Elizabeth Eisenstein's study of typography and its effects, the argument that the printing revolution formed the basis of the public sphere as outlined by Jürgen Habermas, among others, makes a lot of sense. 

This is the basis of Jay Rosen's notion of public journalism. Like me, Jay was a student of Neil Postman's, and his idea parallel's Postman's in Teaching as a Conserving Activity in looking at print-based institutions as needing to work against the biases of the electronic media environment. That's why  Jay argues that journalists need to create a public, and not only try to reach one. 

Of course, the problem is that the public is no more in an electronic environment, the effects of which include the blurring of public and private, as McLuhan, Joshua Meyrowitz in No Sense of Place, and others have noted (much more has been said about the decline and disappearance of privacy, but the fate of the private and the public are intertwined).

I would also note that Jacques Ellul, in his book Propaganda, explains how individualism, in breaking down ties based on tradition, locality, tribe, etc., leads to the mass, which consists of large numbers of individuals without any organic ties. Perhaps we can break this process down, so that the first stage of individualism, which McLuhan, Walter Ong, and others connect to the isolating effect of literacy, results in the formation of the public. 

Detribalized, able to free themselves from the need, in the absence of any external storage medium, to preserve knowledge through collective memory, able to view and review their thoughts and engage in critical evaluation, to think independently and to think novel thoughts, a group of readers becomes a public. As individual members of a public, they share a common literate culture, but one that also depends on orality in the form of public speaking, discussion, debate, deliberation, etc. We associate this type of speech with the agora and other gathering places, from Eisenstein's printers' shops to Habermas's coffee houses, but again it is an orality produced by literate mentalities, as are the dialogues Plato attributes to Socrates. 

Media environments are always built on and incorporate the environments that came before, so the ideal of the Enlightenment is based on a balance between literacy and orality, as Postman has suggested. And maybe there is an inverse relationship between the amount of dialogue and speech that mediates between print media and readers, and the shift from a public to the mass. 

The shift goes along with new technologies, steam powered printing for shifting the orality-literacy balance away from hearing and towards reading, the mechanical reproduction of images and photography as antagonistic to the word in all modes (spoken, written, and printed), telegraphy and further developments in telecommunications as increasing the potential for mass communication. It would follow that what Daniel Boorstin in The Image describes as the graphic revolution, based on these and other innovations, results in a shift from the public to the mass.

Anyway, what I would say is that electronic technology amplified the effects of print, at first, for example in the way that telegraphic messages took the form of telegrams and wire service reports in newspapers. With radio and then television, print became the content of broadcasting, as McLuhan would put it, as programming was often scripted, including news reporting, while programming following a schedule is also very much a typographic type of structure. 

So typographic biases were initially amplified, but it is important to keep in mind that amplification often turns into distortion. 

It was the internet that fully unleashed the potential of the electronic media, bringing back in a new way a kind of neo-tribalism. This relates to McLuhan's laws of media, specifically the law of reversal, as the mass, as an effect of the first stage of electronic telecommunications, flips into siloing, a reversal from the anonymous heterogeneity of the mass into groups based on affinity and shared identity. And/or, maybe the mass in and of itself is ultimately unsustainable, certainly going against the grain of human nature? 

Certainly, printing was associated with homogenizing culture and society, and electronic media always had the potential and the actuality of undoing that effect, that potential muted as long as print remained the content of broadcasting, but now unleashed as broadcasting and telecommunications become the content of online media.

It follows then, that the crisis of the mainstream, or its actual disappearance, is an effect of the electronic media, and quite possibly an irrevocable one at that. 

So, those are my thoughts on the matter, more or less, at least for now. Where do we go from here? That is a hard question to answer.

Some More Reading for the Summer

So, this is the third year in a row that Roy Christopher asked me to contribute to his Summer Reading List feature, where he compiles the recommendations of various scholars and intellectuals, based on the books they intend to read over the summer months. And of course, I'm happy to contribute, as this also gives me an excuse to pull out a set of volumes from the rather massive piles I have stored up all over the place. And being the kind of person I am, having made this commitment, I will be sure to complete the readings I've assigned myself, no matter the distractions or other readings that might join the batch.

You can read my selections, along with those of several others, over on Roy's blog and website, under the heading of Summer Reading List, 2014, which he posted on June 25th.  But for the record, here on my own blog of record, I will record my picks, complete with links to Amazon for ease of ordering in case you are so moved to do so:

At the top of my reading list for this summer is On Reflection: An Essay on Technology, Education and the Status of Thought in the Twenty-First Century (Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2013) by Ellen Rose, an outstanding scholar. And speaking of great scholars, I have Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’s most recent work, Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) high up on my stack as well.

I am also looking forward to reading B. W. Powe’s important study, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye: Apocalypse and Alchemy (University of Toronto Press, 2014). This looks to be a summer for biographical and semibiographical works, as I also have lined up In Thought and Action: The Enigmatic Life of S. I. Hayakawa (University of Nebraska Press, 2011) by Gerald W. Haslam with Janice E. Haslam, and Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs (Baylor University Press, 2013) by Brett T. Robinson, as well as The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance (Anchor, 2007) by Fritjof Capra.

I’ve picked up some second hand books that I intend to enjoy this summer, including two from Ralph Waldo Emerson. One is a stray volume of his collected works that combines two of his major publications, The Conduct of Life and Society and Solitude (Macmillan, 1910). The other is Essays And Journals (Programmed Classics, 1968), selected and with an introduction by Lewis Mumford (which alone is worth the price of purchasing the book). And then there’s Understanding Understanding (Harper & Row, 1974), by Humphry Osmond, with John A. Osmond and Jerome Agel, which I am understandably curious about.

For poetry, I can’t wait to delve into the long awaited volume from Dale Winslow, Tinderbox (NeoPoiesis, 2013). And in graphic novels, there’s The Walking Dead Volume 21: All Out War Part 2, real brain food that I’ll no doubt gobble up in one sitting when it comes out in a few weeks.

For the previous years' picks, you can take a look at my 2012 post, Some More Reading List, and last year's S'more Reading Listed.  Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, back over on Roy Christopher's Summer Reading List, 2014, he concluded with his own reading list, and can you guess which book he included? You got it, none other than Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited. 






 
Thanks, Roy! I hope you find it worth your while!

Fordham Notes Amazing

So, since my last post offered A Jewish Take on Amusing and Amazing, in this post I would like to share, in an ecumenical spirit, a post on my book from Fordham Notes, the official blog of Fordham University, Fordham being a Catholic and Jesuit institution.

The blog post is entitled Strate on Postman: Resisting Telegraphic Discourse, and it was written by Tom Stoelker, based on an interview he conducted with me, and posted on May 2nd.

And here is how it went down:

Several people who have read Lance Strate’s new book have described it as a “love letter” to his late mentor, the media ecologist Neil Postman. In the just-released Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited, (Peter Lang, 2014) Strate, professor of communication and media studies, riffs on more than just the title of Postman’s seminal book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which analyzed the way broadcast television, affects politics, journalism, education, and religion.

Strate’s book sets the stage for his academic peers to explore Postman’s theories in today’s new media. Postman explored television landscape in the mid-1980s before cable radically changed the nature of TV, whereas Strate’s book considers the same theories in light of the vast expansion of channel offerings and new networks via cable and satellite, and the addition of the Internet and world-wide web.

Regardless of the time period, Strate said electronic media are all interrelated. But how they have an effect on our democracy seems to have increased exponentially. He noted that the 18th-century leaders struck a healthy balance between the written and spoken word. They were great readers, which informed them to be great rhetoricians.

“Our country was founded by literate individuals and ours is a country that was argued into existence,” he said.

Postman wrote that the image-saturated electronic media eventually undermined reading-and-rhetoric, as electronic media’s emphasis on image elicits an emotional and irrational response. Strate broadens the focus to include the Internet’s speed and immediacy, which he said creates information overload.

“Speed, efficiency, and the overemphasis on technology—where only efficiency matters—puts us into what I call ‘hyper-irrationality,’” he said “Efficiency is a numbers game that takes us away from the balance of literate and oral.”

Postman and Strate argue that such a balance is the very basis of American culture.

When new media first arrived its emphasis on text spurred hope of a new generation of literacy. But now that the net has become increasingly visual, Strate says a “telegraphic discourse” has come to dominate.

“The Internet intrudes in so many ways that even at a church people don’t turn their phones off,” he said. “How do you get a sense of the sacred when we’re just a click away from something else?”

Not surprising, there is a certain commonality of interest between Fordham Notes and the Jewish Standard, and while only part of the book is about religion, as it addresses subjects such as news, politics, education, and American culture as a whole, it is gratifying to know the book has some value beyond secular scholarship.

Acronym Acrimony

So, my last post, Filler Up!, was on an area of nonverbal communication, and it's only fair that I follow it up with a post on verbal communication. In this case, it's on abbreviations, and especially acronyms, which are abbreviations that form a word—for example SNAFU is pronounced as one word, and therefore an acronym, as opposed to vocalizing it as ess-en-ay-eff-yu. And in case you don't know what it stands for, and I hope you will excuse the profanity, it's, Situation Normal, All Fucked Up, and like FUBAR, Fucked Up Beyond All Repair (or Reason or Recognition), is an example of military slang.

But note that while slang traditionally refers to a form of speech that has not been legitimized by appearing in print, acronyms and abbreviations are by-products of written communication, and the alphabet. (By the way, it seems that the story that the curse word spelled eff-yu-cee-kay is an acronym, something I recall hearing about in schoolyard back when I was in elementary school, is just an urban legend, at least according to Wikipedia.)

So, if the abbreviation can't be pronounced, it can't become an acronym. For example, HTML lacks any vowels, and it would be awkward and not very compelling to pronounce it as something like hitmul, so we just say aych-tee-em-el. If it is pronounceable, then it may be turned into an acronym, but it's not inevitable that it will be. For example, the abbreviation USA could be pronounced as oossa or youza, but it isn't, its you-ess-ay (repeated ad nauseum as a cheer if you like).

I should add that some acronyms are back formations that take an actual word and work out a workable phrase that it can serve as an abbreviation of. For example, a simple computer programming language that was popular once upon a time was dubbed BASIC, which stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Similarly, Marvel Comics turned the word SHIELD into an acronym for its fictional spy agency, originally having it stand for Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division, and then later changing it to Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate, and then in their films and television programs to Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.

Speaking of which, I think they did a pretty good job on the new Agents of SHIELD television program on ABC, which recently completed its first season. And speaking of comics, one of the all-time great acronyms is SHAZAM, which stands for the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury. Shazam was the name of the wizard who gave the superhero Captain Marvel his powers, or rather who gave young Billy Batson the ability to turn into Captain Marvel by shouting, Shazam! 

Captain Marvel had powers similar to Superman's, so DC (an abbreviation of Detective Comics, although it was then known as National Comics) sued Fawcett Publications, and Fawcett eventually agreed to stop publication of Captain Marvel. DC later bought the rights to publish Fawcett's superheroes, including Captain Marvel, but in the meantime Marvel Comics had introduced their own superhero with that name, naturally enough given the name of that company, and DC consequently has been using Shazam more and more over the past few decades in reference to the character instead of Captain Marvel, and recently renamed the hero Shazam, dropping Captain Marvel altogether. 

Anyway, the point here is that the exclamation, Shazam!, worked its way into popular speech, and while its meaning as an acronym is still present in the comics, in other contexts that meaning was lost (which is reflected by the fact that it's printed as Shazam and not SHAZAM). This compilation of clips from the 1960s CBS sitcom, Gomer Pyle, USMC (pronounced yu-ess-em-cee), starring Jim Nabors, while a bit obnoxious, demonstrates how he used shazam! as an exclamation alongside golly and gosh (slang words that are not abbreviations of anything), and utterly devoid of its acronmymic meaning. This, by the way, was the first I ever heard of the expression, as the original Captain Marvel comic ceased publication several years before I was born, and he wasn't resurrected by DC until I was a teenager. Anyway, through Gomer Pyle, Shazam! was transformed into a kind of military slang, at least on television. And also on record album, it appears:





But this winding and long-winded introduction is meant to introduce the topic of abbreviations and acronyms as a part of the public discourse of our culture, and following the same pattern as my last post, the fact that I have some comments on the topic began with a query from Palash Ghosh of the International Business Times, which I'll provide first, along with my response.  In this instance, Ghosh sent me the following query: 

can you make a comment on the use of acronyms and abbreviations in media.

I have noticed that media/newspapers/magazines in my native India use abbreviations and acronyms all the time–perhaps even excessively. I realize the acronyms and abbreviations are necessary as short-cuts and they are also used in western media–but do you such things are used too much in media? If so, do they serve to confuse the reader? Do most media have to use these things due to the urgency of instantaneous communications?

And here now is my reply:

Acronyms and abbreviations are quite common in American culture. For example, POTUS recently delivered the SOTU, many members of the SCOTUS were present, and it went off without a SNAFU, and most Americans who watched it on TV thought it was OK. It seems as if we never pass up an opportunity to shorten a word, either by cutting off syllables, which is why the head of a committee is called a chair now, rather than substituting chairperson as a non-sexist alternative to chairman, or by substituting initials for full names and terms. Sometimes I think us Americans would be happiest if we could only reduce our words down to a series of grunts.

Abbreviations and acronyms are an unintended consequences of the invention of the alphabet, and have their origins in antiquity. When words could only be written out by hand, or even more laboriously chiseled out of stone, abbreviations were welcome, sometimes necessary to make words fit into a limited space, and had the added utility of functioning as icons for the illiterate, who could recognize the look of the symbols and recall their meaning without actually reading, that is sounding out, the letters. For example, in ancient Israel, the name Maccabee, associated with the holiday of Hanukkah, is an acronym that stands for Mi Chamocha Ba'alim Adonai, the beginning of one of the oldest prayers in the Bible, translated as, "Who is like unto You among the gods (that are worshipped), O Lord?" In the early Christian church, abbreviations such as IHS were used as symbols for Jesus Christ--in this case IHS corresponds to the first three letters of the name Jesus in the Greek alphabet, iota, eta, and sigma, and is also said to stand for the Latin phrase, Iesus Hominum Salvator, which means Jesus, Savior of Men.

Gutenberg's invention of printing with moveable type made the need for abbreviations less pressing than before. While there still would be a degree of economy achieved in using initials and acronyms when typesetting a page, the investment made in spelling things out would be returned in the mass production of the document, as the mechanization of what was once written out by hand would yield economies of scale in the form of multiple, identical copies with increased legibility, clarity, and accessibility. The invention of the telegraph in the early 19th century restored the need for economy of expression, as pricing often was based on the number of words used. As this first of the electronic media made instantaneous communication possible, speed went hand in hand with brevity, and the use of abbreviations and acronyms was intensified as never before. Telegraphic discourse not only was seen in the exchange of messages among individuals via telegrams, but in the transmission of news reports over the wires, which led newspapers to adopt the pyramid structure for articles (beginning with the most important information in the first paragraph, and continuing in descending order, rather than in telling a story in linear fashion from beginning to middle to end), the mosaic look of the front page (again, nonlinear and anticipating the current hypertextual interface of the World-Wide Web), and the big, bold headline, where abbreviations and acronyms were visually trumpeted. This made telegraphic discourse, including the use of abbreviations and acronyms, a central part of the culture.

Telegraphic discourse was further intensified by the addition of wireless telegraph, radio, and television, but it is especially in communication via electronic text that it is most apparent. This begins with the use of email going back to the 70s, and is reinforced a little later by the addition of synchronous messaging, aka chat, which puts even more pressure on the participants communicating in real time to use the fast, most efficient means of sending messages. The further economy imposed by the 160 character limit of SMS or text messaging via cell phones, and Twitter's 140 character limit piggybacking on top of SMS, has led to an explosion of such textual devices as lol, brb, bff, not to mention the innovation of emoticons, the use of typographical symbols to convey facial expressions and emotional states.

There are times when speed and efficiency are necessary, and times when the available writing space is limited, so that economical use of abbreviations and acronyms can be helpful. Acronyms also can serve mnemonic functions, as for example students memorize the names of the Great Lakes through the acronym HOMES (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior). But in American culture, and in technological societies in general, the extent to which telegraphic discourse has come to dominate contemporary communication is a symptom of what Jacques Ellul called "the humiliation of the word." It represents a loss of the richness of language, a disregard for poetics and rhetoric, for eloquence in human communication, and as well a loss of nuance and precision, and consequently an increase in the likelihood of misunderstanding. Our overuse of abbreviations and acronyms is one of several facets of the degraded form of discourse that constitutes communication in the 21st century.

So that was my take on the media ecology of acronyms, and how we may be abbreviating ourselves to death, as well as informing, amusing, and amazing ourselves to death as well. 

So now, on February 5, 2014, the International Business Times published Ghosh's article on the subject, which is entitled, Alphabet Soup: Why Is Indian Media So Obsessed With Acronyms And Abbreviations?  And while he did bring up India in his query, I will admit to being surprised that his article focused on India, which made for an interesting cross-cultural comparison:

Consider the following passage from a recent article published in The Hindu newspaper of India: “CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat on Monday expressed hope that the AIADMK-Left alliance would ensure success in Tamil Nadu.”

Or this paragraph from Indian Express: “The allegations against Jaitley and Modi came from AAP MLA from Kasturba Nagar, Madan Lal… Reports suggested that Lal was one of the MLAs who would support expelled AAP MLA Vinod Kumar Binny. Along with JD(U) MLA Shoaib Iqbal and Independent MLA Rambir Shokeen, Binny had threatened to pull down the AAP government.”

Or this ditty from India Today: “Final postmortem report from the medical board of the doctors of AIIMS is awaited. This final report will also take toxicology report from CFSL/CBI into consideration… On January 30 at around 5 pm, he was brought dead in AIIMS accordingly a case u/s 302 IPC & 3 of SC/ST Act was registered."

With respect to the first example, CPI(M) refers to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – to distinguish it from the regular Communist Party of India, which is usually labelled as just CPI.

The AIADMK refers to the extravagantly named All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the political party that currently runs the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

In reference to the second example, AAP refers to the Aam Aadmi Party, a new anti-corruption party that swept into power in the capital city of Delhi. MLA means Member of Legislative Assembly – an office that is just below MP (Member of Parliament). JD(U) refers to Janata Dal (United), a center-left Indian political party.

In the incomprehensible third example, AIIMS refers to the All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (a group of public medical schools across the country), while CFSL is the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, a branch of the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs. Also, CBI stands for the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s principal police investigation agency. The last sentence in that paragraph simply may seem to defy translation – but 302 IPC refers to Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code, while SC/ST Act refers to the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act of 1989, a law designed to prevent abuse and mistreatment of lower-caste Indians.

In any case, these three passages underline one of the fundamental realities of Indian media and communications – the obsession with acronyms and abbreviations. For the uninitiated, reading an Indian newspaper, magazine or government publication could become quite daunting.

At this point, we do get a connection to American culture, and perhaps to the English language in particular:

Of course, such devices are used to save space and time – and they are also widely used in Western media. For example, in the United States, John F. Kennedy has become the iconic “JFK,” while in Europe the notorious Dominique Strauss-Kahn has metamorphosed into the more familiar “DSK.”

Still, in the English-language media of the Indian subcontinent (which also includes Pakistan and Bangladesh) the use of acronyms and abbreviations in communications seems almost pathological. Within India itself, the plethora of political parties, political groups and titles for lawmakers, military personnel and educators has created an immense reservoir of acronyms and abbreviations that boggle the readers’ mind and threaten to drown the meaning behind the text of media pieces. The inundation of so many acronyms likely looks like gobbledygook to non-Indian readers.

Patralekha Chatterjee, a New Delhi-based journalist, admitted that Indian media rely too heavily on the use of acronyms, but explained the realities behind this practice. “Sometimes, it is also because of the constraints of space,” she said in an interview. “Space is at a massive premium because of [advertisements], etc.” In addition, the name of some Indian political parties and luminaries are so long, like the aforementioned All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, that abbreviations become necessary.

Indeed, English may be the lingua franca of Indian media, finance and politics, but it is a second language for hundreds of millions of people who speak hundreds of other different languages and thousands of dialects – rendering the use of an alien tongue a questionable and imperfect attempt to foster a kind of national unity.

But something has gotten lost in the translation.

Chatterjee also noted that most Indian journalists try to squeeze in some context and write the full name of an organization (or political party or branch of government, etc.) at the start of an article and then follow with acronyms. “But it ultimately depends on the readership,” she said. “If the [editorial] desk thinks [that] most of your readers would be familiar with a certain acronym, then it is used. But if you are referring to something which would be unfamiliar to the average reader of the newspaper/magazine, then it is the full name.”

Since Chatterjee writes for the international and national media, she tries to minimize the use of acronyms in her works. “I can imagine all this being extremely confusing to a foreigner or someone who is not familiar with what is going on in India and picks up a newspaper/magazine,” she conceded.

It's an interesting question. Certainly, the use of acronyms is a general function of the alphabet, and in some ways amplified by typography. And it does seem as if the English language in its written form makes greater use of abbreviations than other languages, perhaps because of the idiosyncrasies of English spelling? But its overuse does strike me as an effect of electronic communications, and the technological drive towards greater and greater efficiency. Those factors, I would think, are what have pushed this usage over the edge.)

The practice has also become epidemic in the United States. On a blog for the Baltimore Sun newspaper, John McIntyre called for a limitation on the use of abbreviations, amidst concern that their presence may compromise readability. “Professional publications embrace abbreviations and acronyms much more readily as a kind of lodge handshake identifying who is in the club,” McIntyre wrote. “Lawyers and civil servants are particularly addicted to the practice.” McIntyre suggested that his personal preference is to minimize abbreviations and acronyms “because they distract me and quickly convey a leaden bureaucratic tone to articles.”

As in India, documents produced by the U.S. government, medical, military and scientific organizations are typically overwhelmed with acronyms. As a blogger on the Baltimore Sun complained: “As one who has spent many hours editing Defense Department documents, I have seen too many pages reduced to incomprehensible alphabet soup by acronyms. Their use should be minimized; that's not even a question.”

What about my response, you may be wondering at this point. Or probably not, but I'll remind you anyway, and here it comes:

It seems as if we never pass up an opportunity to shorten a word, either by cutting off syllables, which is why the head of a committee is called a chair now, rather than substituting chairperson as a non-sexist alternative to chairman, or by substituting initials for full names and terms, commented Dr. Lance Strate, professor of communication and media studies and associate ‘chair’ for undergraduate studies at Fordham University in New York. “Sometimes I think us Americans would be happiest if we could only reduce our words down to a series of grunts.”

And that's all, at least for now, as we get a second opinion on the inhospitality of the practice:

No less a figure than J.W. “Bill” Marriott, the executive chairman and chairman of the board of the hotel chain Marriott International Inc. (NASDAQ:MAR,) has spoken out against the excessive use of abbreviations. In a witty blog he titled “T.M.A. – Too Many Acronyms!,” Marriott bemoaned the infiltration of acronyms and abbreviations in daily communications. “We have far too many acronyms,” he lamented. “It started with government agencies (GOV), and it has invaded corporate (CORP) headquarters (HQ). Like an invasive species, it’s threatening to choke off innovation.”

As a native of Washington, D.C., he noted, acronyms are part of his very blood. “There’s DC [District of Columbia], DOD [Department of Defense], DOT [Department of Transportation] and DOJ [Department of Justice],” he quipped. “Don’t confuse the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] with the FEC [Federal Election Commission] or the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] and FDA [Food & Drug Administration]. We all know the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], NIH [National Institutes of Health] and EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]. In the corporate world, we tremble when we hear SEC [U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission], IRS [Internal Revenue Service] or FTC [Federal Trade Commission].”

Marriott noted that the three-letter acronyms seem to have a “prestige and status” over the four- or five-letter ones, citing that the longer acronym usually salutes the shorter one – i.e., NHTSA [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] to DOT or DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]to DOD. “I’ll leave you with my favorite acronym: STML – short-term memory loss,” Marriott concluded. “Let’s forget these useless acronyms. Chances are we already have. We don’t understand them.”

Now the emergence (and seeming omnipresence) of social media will likely give acronyms an even higher place in our daily lives – and that’s nothing to LOL about.

Ghosh does give me the last word, however:

But Strate cautions than acronyms have a long history and are likely to remain as long as humans communicate.

“Abbreviations and acronyms are an unintended consequences of the invention of the alphabet, and have their origins in antiquity,” he noted. “When words could only be written out by hand, or even more laboriously chiseled out of stone, abbreviations were welcome, sometimes necessary to make words fit into a limited space, and had the added utility of functioning as icons for the illiterate, who could recognize the look of the symbols and recall their meaning without actually reading, that is sounding out, the letters.”

Still, as a scholar and one who wishes to preserve the beauty of language, Strate laments: “Our overuse of abbreviations and acronyms is one of several facets of the degraded form of discourse that constitutes communication in the 21st century.”

And there you have it! Acronyms are, in moderation, a bit of a SHAZAM!-like magic transformation. But used too frequently and it's SNAFU, with language and culture threatening to go entirely FUBAR. At least, that's my abbreviated take on the matter.