An Ecology of Culture
Starting this week you might have noticed a new category: Mediology. The idea is to reclassify old posts that are somehow related to this method of analysis as well as to stimulate new writing in this area.
Mediology was conceived in the late 90’s by Régis Debray, as “an original mode of coming to knowledge” [as opposed to a doctrine or a science], with the objective of closing the gap between technology [usually lowbrow media forms like TV and cinema] and culture [mostly highbrow forms like art and literature], disintegrating the conception that they operate against each other. In Debray’s own words, “it is time to think them systematically one by the other, one with the other.”
As a method of analysis, Mediology proposes a thought process that systematically correlates a “symbolic corpus [a religion, a doctrine, an artistic genre, a discipline, etc…], a form of collective organization [a church, a party, a school, an academy] and a technical system of communication [recording, storage and trace circulation].” The result is an attempt to make sense of the transformation of media by culture and the transformation of culture by media, understanding media as a system that is composed of technology and the popular culture that evolves around it.
By looking at the modern media landscape through the eyes of the mediologist, we could bump into insights that can potentially help us evolve our skills as media producers and analysts of new manifestations of the digital age such as social media or user generated content, which certainly take the concepts of culture and technology to a whole new level, perhaps forcing us to become mediologists in our own right.
Just to provide a simple, practical example, consider this one grabbed from Régis Debray’s official Mediology site:
“A study of the desire for immortality would be welcome in itself, but it would become mediological only if one endeavors to show how this intimate aspiration changed under the effect of painting, the photograph, cinema, television, in short, with the apparatuses of the collective imaginary.”
Another fascinating trait of this area is rooted in its theoretical background and its aim to understand and modernize the body of knowledge that we have inherited from “the intuitions of great pioneers” like “Walter Benjamin, Valéry, McLuhan, Walter Ong, etc…” in an effort to build a coherent “ecology of culture.”
Debray’s 1999 Le Monde Diplomatique article explaining Mediology is available here courtesy of Georgetown University.