Abstract: As digital technologies become increasingly embedded and mundane, the postdigital condition challenges traditional notions of media, nature, and human experience. At the same time, the field of media ecology has long examined how communication technologies shape consciousness, culture, and society. This article brings postdigital theory and media ecology into conversation, arguing that their convergence offers a powerful lens for understanding today’s technologized world.
Keywords: Digital technology · Media ecology · Postdigital condition
Source: Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-025-00578-5. Received: 18 June 2025 / Revised: 18 June 2025 / Accepted: 19 June 2025
© The Author(s) 2025.
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0.
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Media Ecology in the Postdigital Condition
Tiffany Petricini*
* Tiffany Petricini. tzr106@psu.edu
Introduction
The normalization of digital technology in everyday life has given rise to the concept of the postdigital, a condition in which digital media are no longer regarded as novel or as something separate from natural human social life (see, e.g., Jandrić et al. 2018; Cramer 2015; Knox 2023; McLuhan 1964/1994; Cascone 2000; Strate 2006). At the same time, scholars in the media ecology tradition have long examined how communication technologies function as environments that shape human consciousness and society (see, e.g., McLuhan 1964/1994; Innis 1951; Havelock 1963; Ong 1982; Eisenstein 1979; Postman 1992; Strate 2006). This essay intersects postdigital theory and media ecology, focusing on how each framework understands the relationship between media technology and human culture.
Postdigital Theory: Origins and Key Concepts
Postdigital theory has emerged in recent years to characterize a stage where digital technology is so embedded in daily life that the distinction between ‘digital’ and ‘analog’ or ‘natural’ is no longer clear (Jandrić et al. 2018). One early signal of this mindset was Nicholas Negroponte’s (1998) declaration that ‘the digital revolution is over’. The term ‘postdigital’ does not mean we are past using digital technology, but that the digital is now an ordinary and ubiquitous part of the human environment. Postdigital theory was incepted at the beginning of the twenty-first century in art contexts (Cascone 2000; Pepperell and Punt 2000). A decade later, scholars such as Petar Jandrić and Jeremy Knox, have extended postdigital ideas into education and critical media studies. As Jandrić and collaborators put it, the postdigital condition ‘is not about technology, but it insists that technology co-creates our reality’ (Jandrić and McLaren 2020: 632). This perspective emphasizes the postdigital stance that human social existence and technological systems are deeply entangled.
Themes in Postdigital Thought
Key themes in postdigital theory include the great convergence of scientific and technological domains (e.g., digital–analog, biology–information), which reshapes how we understand knowledge, life, and society; the emergence of postdigital ecopedagogies that address the entangled crises of environment, education, and technology; and the reconfiguration of postdigital research through transdisciplinary and antidisciplinary approaches that challenge conventional academic boundaries and embrace methodological complexity (Jandrić and Knox 2022).
While early understandings of postdigital theory emphasized the ubiquity and invisibility of digital technologies, more recent scholarship has complicated the notion by highlighting its material and political dimensions. Knox (2023) argues that the postdigital condition demands we pay attention not just to how digital technologies become mundane, but also to the socio-economic systems that support their pervasiveness, like the environmental costs of server farms (see also Selwyn 2021). In this sense, the postdigital is not merely a cultural shift but an invitation to critically examine the infrastructures and inequalities that undergird contemporary life.
Generally, the postdigital perspective challenges the idea of technological neutrality. Instead of viewing technologies as simple tools, postdigital scholars emphasize that digital media are entangled with human values, behaviors, and institutions. Another significant contribution of postdigital theory is its emphasis on hybridity and convergence. The postdigital blurs the lines not only between analog and digital but also between human and machine, nature and culture, education and industry. Jandrić and Ford (2022) have explored how postdigital ecopedagogy must grapple with these hybrid entanglements, where learning environments are saturated with both ecological crises and technological systems. This reorientation challenges traditional disciplinary boundaries and calls for transdisciplinary methods that combine insights from humanities, sciences, and engineering.
Media Ecology: Origins and Key Concepts
Media ecology is an intellectual tradition, dating to the mid-twentieth century that studies media as environments. Pioneers of media ecology like Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Walter J. Ong, Harold Innis, Lewis Mumford, and Jacques Ellul argued that communication technologies are not neutral tools but powerful forces that structure how humans think and how society is organized. McLuhan (1964/1994) famously proclaimed that ‘the medium is the message’, meaning the characteristics of a medium (for example, print vs. television vs. digital media) influence society more profoundly than any particular content carried by that medium. Media ecologists highlight historical shifts—from an oral culture to a literate culture, from print to electronic media—to show how each dominant medium reconfigures human cognition and social patterns (see, e.g., Ong 1982; McLuhan 1964/1994; Havelock 1963; Innis 1951; Eisenstein 1979; Goody 1977).
A core insight of media ecology is that technologies extend human senses and abilities, but in doing so, they also numb or bias those senses. McLuhan illustrated this idea with the myth of Narcissus: the term Narcissus is rooted in narcosis (numbness), and McLuhan (1964/1994) argued that people become entranced by extensions of themselves and oblivious to their effects. In other words, society can be narcotized by a new medium, showing a phenomenon of self-amnesia or ‘narcosis’ in the face of technological extensions.
Media ecology also examines the power dynamics created by dominant media. Innis (1950), for instance, showed that control of a prevailing medium can create monopolies of knowledge, enabling elites to hoard information and power. Historically, the rise of each new medium (clay tablets, papyrus, print, radio, etc.) disrupted old monopolies while often establishing new ones.
Media ecologists have paid special attention to how media technologies shape mental life. Walter Ong (1986), for example, argued that writing is a technology that restructures consciousness by externalizing words and fostering reflection. He noted that ‘technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and writing heightens consciousness’ (Ong 1982: 82). In this sense, the advent of literacy created new forms of interiority and analytical thought—an insight that can be extended to how digital media might be altering cognition today. In the late twentieth century, Neil Postman continued this line of analysis, critiquing television’s impact on public discourse and later warning of a state of Technopoly (1992). Postman feared that in a technopoly, cultural meaning and social institutions become subservient to technological imperatives.
Jacques Ellul (1964) argued that modern technology (la technique) has become an autonomous environment of its own. In Ellul’s view, human beings are increasingly enclosed in a self-perpetuating technical system that determines social norms according to efficiency and rationalization.
Themes in Media Ecology
Media ecology, while unified by the insight that media technologies shape human environments, can be parsed into several overlapping strands of thought that clarify its relationship to other disciplines.
First, historical media ecology emphasizes long-term transformations in human communication. Innis and Ong traced how shifts from oral to literate to electronic cultures restructured societies. Innis (1951) identified how different media privilege certain temporal or spatial biases: oral cultures emphasize community and memory, while print promotes abstraction and standardization. Ong (1982) extended this analysis by examining how literacy reshapes consciousness, arguing that the technologies humans create simultaneously transform their internal cognitive structures.
Second, medium theory represents a central pillar of media ecology, exemplified by McLuhan’s (1964/1994) declaration that ‘the medium is the message’. McLuhan and, later, Neil Postman focused on the properties of specific media and their social consequences. For McLuhan (1964/1994), the transition from print to electronic media signaled a shift from linear, individualistic thought toward more holistic, tribal modes of consciousness. Postman (1985) sharpened this critique in Amusing Ourselves to Death, arguing that television degraded public discourse by prioritizing entertainment over rational argumentation. Medium theorists contend that form, not content, is primary in understanding media effects.
Third, media ecology intersects with the philosophy of technology, particularly in the works of Ellul and Mumford. Ellul (1964) introduced the concept of la technique—the autonomous and self-perpetuating nature of technological development. He warned that technological systems evolve according to their own internal logic of efficiency, often escaping human control. Mumford (1967), similarly, critiqued what he called the megamachine, a synthesis of human labor and technological apparatus that, once unleashed, restructures society along mechanical, hierarchical lines. While Ellul and Mumford are not always classified strictly as media ecologists, their influence on the field’s critical stance toward technological determinism is profound.
In more recent years, contemporary media ecology has expanded to address digital and networked environments. Lance Strate (2006) and other scholars have continued McLuhan’s and Postman’s legacy by examining how newer forms of media extend and complicate earlier ecological frameworks. These newer contributions often engage with adjacent fields like information ecology and digital humanities, reflecting the increasing entanglement of media, technology, and culture.
Media Ecology and Postdigital Studies in Scholarly Conversation
Recent scholarship in Postdigital Science and Education demonstrates points of intersection between media ecology and postdigital theory, although it is quite selective. A scan of ten recent articles reveals that the term ‘media ecology’ appears explicitly in three cases. For instance, Jiang and Vetter (2020) reference media ecologies in the context of problematic information and critical media literacy, particularly noting how social media platforms fail to manage misinformation. Campbell and Olteanu (2024) refer to media ecology approaches, citing Fuller (2005) and Strate (2008), to conceptualize media as environments, a core tenet of the media ecology tradition. Meyerhofer-Parra et al. (2024) likewise mention media ecology when discussing the evolution of storytelling strategies in contemporary media environments.
While these instances show that media ecology continues to inform certain postdigital discussions, the presence is limited and often serves as a background frame rather than a central analytic tool. Notably, in Explorations in Media Ecology, a leading journal explicitly dedicated to media ecology, the term ‘postdigital’ does not appear at all. This absence suggests a divergence in how each field has evolved. Postdigital theory tends to view technology broadly, entangling digital, biological, and ecological dimensions, while media ecology remains more rooted in the analysis of media technologies and environments specifically tied to communication.
Intersections and Divergences Between Postdigital Theory and Media Ecology
Despite their different genealogies, postdigital theory and media ecology share important conceptual ground. Both traditions emphasize that technology is not neutral but fundamentally shapes human environments and ways of being. Each tradition insists that understanding technology requires looking beyond tools and content to focus on systems, infrastructures, and effects that often operate beneath conscious awareness. Both also stress the need for historical and ecological thinking: seeing technologies not in isolation, but as part of dynamic, evolving environments that transform cognition, culture, and society.
However, there are also critical differences. One key divergence lies in their scope of inquiry. Media ecology focuses on media technologies, specifically technologies of communication and symbolic exchange. From oral traditions through the printing press to television and the Internet, media ecologists analyze how shifts in communicative forms restructure human consciousness and social organization. In contrast, postdigital theory considers digital technologies more broadly, which can include computation, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic systems. This broader frame allows postdigital theory to interrogate areas such as bioinformatics, digital surveillance, and smart infrastructures that fall outside classic media ecological analysis.
Another important distinction concerns their temporal orientation. Media ecology has often been concerned with tracing long historical arcs like the rise and fall of dominant media, shifts in sensory hierarchies, and epochs of communication (oral, literate, electronic). Postdigital theory, while not ignoring history, tends to focus on the present condition and the ways in which digital technologies have become ubiquitous, mundane, and infrastructural in everyday life.
Conclusion
The convergence of media ecology and postdigital theory offers a fertile ground for understanding the deeply entangled relationships between media, technology, and human culture. While each tradition emerges from distinct intellectual lineages, both share a foundational insight. Technologies are not neutral instruments but formative forces that co-create our lived realities. Media ecology contributes a powerful historical lens and a rich vocabulary for understanding how media environments shape consciousness and social structures. Postdigital theory, in turn, expands the frame, urging us to attend not only to communicative shifts but also to the infrastructural, ecological, and political entanglements of the digital condition.
The divergences between media ecology and postdigital theory should not be seen as obstacles but as complementary strengths. Media ecology’s insights into how technologies transform consciousness can deepen postdigital theory’s account of how digital infrastructures shape not just society but subjectivity. Postdigital theory’s attention to materiality and the broader political economy of technology can push media ecology to move beyond a focus on communication media alone and engage more fully with the wider digital systems that condition contemporary life. Both traditions would benefit from greater dialogue around ecological metaphors.
The postdigital can extend media ecology’s relevance into domains such as algorithmic governance, bio-digital convergence, and platform labor, while media ecology’s emphasis on perception, cognition, and historical transformation can lend depth to postdigital critiques of technological embeddedness. As digital systems become ever more mundane yet consequential, a dialogue between these two frameworks becomes increasingly necessary. Together, they offer not only a richer account of our technological present but also a more nuanced vocabulary for imagining more conscious, just, and ecologically attuned futures.
Author Contribution: The author was solely responsible for the conceptualization, writing, and editing of this manuscript.
Data Availability: No datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.
Declarations: Ethics Approval. This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by the author. No ethical approval was required for this commentary.
Consent for Publication: Not applicable.
Competing Interests: The author declares no competing interests.
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