Media Ecology, Neil Postman’s Legacy. A Book Review of Cali’s Mapping Media Ecology. Introduction to the Field.

It is the study of media environments, the idea that technology and techniques, modes of information and codes of communication play a leading role in human affairs. Media ecology is the Toronto School, and the New York School. It is technological determinism, hard and soft, and technological evolution. It is media logic, medium theory, mediology. It is McLuhan Studies, orality-literacy studies, American cultural studies. It is grammar and rhetoric, semiotics and systems theory, the history and the philosophy of technology. It is the postindustrial and the postmodern, and the preliterate and prehistoric.⁴

But, following in the footsteps of Dennis Cali, we return to Postman to try to identify some fundamental points of his intellectual legacy that remain very current and rich in perspectives.

Three key points: media ecology, leisure time management, and the risk of the technopolis

First, he is credited with being the founder of media ecology, which he first chartered teaching at New York University and then taught the rest of his life. At that point, the current sensitivity for the problem of the physical conservation of the planet had not yet appeared in all its drama. Much less the issue of balance in the sphere of media, such that media could be an instrument for development and not–to use a prophetic expression of Marshall McLuhan – as if it were ‘guns aimed at our temples’. Postman went even further, sensing that the equilibrium of the physical sphere undermined by climate change should correspond to a balance in the sphere of media, as a consequence of the intimate and profound correspondence between the real and the virtual that was already manifested and that today appears in all his evidence. For example, the relationship between young and old belongs to this scope, with the singular observation that the expansion of the media universe does not correspond to the greater intergenerational dialogue that one would have expected, but on the contrary exaggerating opposing positions: the media consumption of adolescents deviates more and more from that of adults and vice versa. Here is another point at which media ecology is called upon to suggest the necessary remedies.

A second reason, for which Postman deserves not only to be remembered, but to be energetically revived today, lies in his exposition of the risk that contemporary man is running more and more towards ‘having fun to death’. In other words, the risk that the Fordist slavery to machines will be succeeded by a much more subtle slavery to hard-earned leisure time. Even today, of course, of the seven billion people that populate the planet, only a portion can say that they have liberated themselves in sufficient measure from the physical weight of work. But it is also true that the advanced bit of our global society that has gained this condition and to which we Westerners belong now, understands that we must confront the new pitfall of evasion and the spectacularization of so-called free time, with all the transgressions and negativity that comes with it: an impressive fall from meaning and ideals, a profound rupture of the relationship between man and nature and, in practice, a search for evasion that is the conquest ground of every form of consumerist speculation. This evolution concerns, above all, the youth’s world, captured and dazzled by the beams of light of the great stadium concerts and stunned by the sound systems of the clubs. So the Postman hyperbole unfortunately comes true in the individual deaths from excessive behaviors when partying or in other tragedies like the suicidal path of the atrocious game ‘Whale’ conveyed by social networks.

A third reason that should revive Postman’s thought is given by his further reflection on what he called the ‘technopolis’, that is the contemporary form of every human aggregate.

I purposely used the word Tecnopoli to indicate a culture in which the goals that survive are those that the technology itself can make us achieve. We ask ourselves only the questions that technology can answer; we only propose to ourselves the problems that technology can solve. Tecnopoli manifests itself as a form of totalitarianism in which tradition, religion, and rituals are considered reactionary and useless old irons to be wiped out on the basis of the triumphal march of technological progress. In the Technopolis, people are considered above all as consumers and the “markets.” People believe that fast is better than slow, that new is better than old, that more is better than less; and, if people can’t get this, then they are forced to rethink the meaning of the word “better.” This can lead to a heartless and spiritually degraded culture….

Does this happen in Italy too? Are Italian children also trained to become consumers and idolize technology? Have they also begun to believe that paradise can be conquered through technological progress? And that all problems can be solved through sophisticated products? And that all that can be done should be done? If the answer is affirmative, then it is very important that the politicians, the educated, and the journalists focus their attention seriously on the problem of the Tecnolopoli, so that the citizen begins to understand what is at stake.⁵

School and media, a dialogue to be restored

Yet another one of Postman’s greatest achievements was that of putting the media world and the school world in close correlation, outlining their deep and necessary connections. We have unfortunately separated these two realities, with the consequence, among other things, of allowing a progressive and almost absolute dominion of the communication on formation and the loss of prestige and function of those who dedicate themselves to the education of young people. In his homeostatic conception of society, Postman was constantly in search of a positive relationship between the two terms, so as to assure the generations that the appropriate balance between conservation and innovation is gradually taking place. Conservation is here understood as a continuous rediscovery of one’s own roots and maintenance of values that often came at a high cost via those who preceded us, from antiquity to the present. Innovation is understood as the ability to experience the change necessary to make us protagonists of our time. ‘Teaching’, said Postman, ‘is an eminently conservative activity of our culture’, and in this sense constitutes the reassuring basis for the exploration of the future. In other words, we must ensure the cultural groundwork. But for this to happen we need formation and communication to have equal dignity, fighting the danger that the latter will belittle or even mock the first. Among other things, this makes teachers minor league characters with respect to the ‘celebrity system’ the media has created. Needless to say, this battle is current and extremely difficult, for example, consider the wide and growing economic inequalities between the world of education and the entertainment world: just think of what happens in the field of football and professional sports in general. In hindsight, it is the same process that leads to the concentration of financial wealth at the expense of the equitable distribution of resources.

The school, precisely the environment eminently destined to welcome young people and form them for life, hosts them (when they do not abandon it) but does not ‘understand’ them, and has a terrible difficulty talking to them.

And it is here that the importance of the contribution of thought and action offered by Neil Postman enters the picture. He has developed two parallel tables: the school curriculum on the one hand and the curriculum of the media on the other. To the extent that they overlap, the school fulfills its educational mission. Insofar as they are strangers to each other, the school fails.

As Giovanni Vinciguerra wrote in the magazine Tuttoscuola on the occasion of Postman’s passing, “It was no accident that Neil Postman had begun to learn about the world of school, and above all the world of childhood, by becoming a teacher in elementary school. He then began an intense academic pursuit, lasting more than forty years, without ever forgetting his first experience of the richness of the human relationship, of the interaction that is established between student and teacher. For this reason he looked with suspicion at the intrusiveness of new media: the TV, but also the computer, perceived as a cause of isolation, social segregation, and massification of thought. In his most famous book, The Disappearance of Childhood (1981), Postman described the process of early transformation of children into “small adults” due to their exposure, from the earliest years of life, to the same kind of information reserved for adults, through the mass communication system: TV, advertising, models, fashion, conduct. The arrival of video games and the Internet has only made “adultized” children and adults even more similar, maintained in turn in a state of maturity never fully reached by the new pressure of the economic and communicational system.

Only the school, according to Postman, could remedy this situation, but on the condition of rediscovering its authentic purpose: to bring people, feelings, and thoughts together. As for new media, it is necessary to educate about technologies, and not with technologies, which otherwise would end up taking over content, as prophesied by Marshall McLuhan. Fundamentally, according to Postman, reading and strong mastery of one’s mother tongue remain even more important than foreign languages and new computer languages. A thesis, this, that it would be wrong to consider traditionalist, anti-modern: the subject’s autonomy, critical thinking, the ability to “read” the media without being dominated, are naturally oriented towards the future.⁶”

However, the American author did not stop to report a risk, he also indicated a method to reconcile the two instances. In practice, he compared those he called the two curricula, the school and the media.

He was referring mainly to the effects of television. Today, recovering his approach, it is also possible to define the social curriculum: enticing and non-punitive – centered on emotion – centered on the present – centered on the image – centered on narration – it favors the isolation of a fictitious personal relationship – allows and exalts anonymity, encouraging the de-empowerment of subjects and attitudes of unpunished offense – the illusion of participating in a group – flattering independence – disapproving of authority, yet substantially authoritarian in promoting fashions, behaviors, and products – continuous over time – insulating in space – discontinuous in content – immediately gratifying – unfaithful in the long run – it enhances horizontality by excluding vertical value and transcendent thought.

As you can see, in each of these matters, social media appears almost diametrically opposed to the school curriculum, which, to refer back to a definition by the philosopher Pietro Prini, necessarily presents itself as a ‘cloistered’ experience, which must therefore invite reflection, calmness, and discernment to get young people to think critically. In any case, the quote from St. Augustine: Quod bonum est tenete [Keep what is good] is more valid now than ever and can indicate the connecting link between media and school that constitutes a path that many teachers already take with intelligence and will.