SYMBOLIC MEDIATION OF EXPERIENCE, COMMUNICATION, AND GENERAL SEMANTICS: IN PRAISE OF CLEARING MEDIATED CLOUDS

Overview In modern societies, media, mass and high-tech or personal and low-tech, provide a means for nearly endless content to be transacted among human beings through perhaps infinite symbol systems. If ecology deals with organisms interacting with environments, media ecology deals with humans interacting through diverse symbolically mediated environments with high-tech, low-tech, mass, or personal media. A mediated environment may be the norm for human interaction in societies incorporating mass and computer mediated communication. Just as there can be crises in the ecology, there can be crises in the media ecology. Hopefully, both crises can be monitored. The term media ecology emerged largely from an exchange between Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, and Eric McLuhan in 1967. Known as the Media Ecology Association [www.media-ecology.org], a most evangelical group of media scholars, media ecology deals with the idea that communication and mediums are environmental and that we, ourselves, are mediated by those environments (Anton, 2006, p. 299). Media ecology scholars examine: and technologies are inseparable from the human condition (p. 306); the social and psychological consequences of media, especially new and emerging ones; and, the cultivation of media ecological awareness in everyday life (p. 305). Postman (1976), influenced by the general semantics movement, amassed that serves as a model of media ecological research (Anton, 2006, pp. 302-3). Postman (1979) explained that media ecology aims to understand how technologies and techniques of control the form, quality, speed, distribution, and direction of information; and how, in turn, such information ... affects people's perceptions, values, and attitudes (p. 186). Strate (2005, pp. 1-3; 2007) sees media ecology as a content area devoted to scholarship focusing on the of technology, media, and symbol systems, and their social, cultural, and psychological impacts. In related terms, Postman (1979) views the printed word, the alphabet, and television images as environments--like language itself, symbolic environments--within which we discover, fashion, and express our humanity in particular ways (p. 186). In light of the accounts of a symbolically mediated environment described by Strate and Postman, I ask: How can general semantics contribute to the deciphering of our mediated environment? My response is presented in this paper. More than ever before, with its dense saturation and intrusiveness (from omnipresent video to surveillance cameras to attached microchips), as a double-bladed sword, our mediated environment helps us through the day and at the same time puts us at risk. Since it links us to the past honorably as well as troublesomely, the general semantics principle of time-binding in the human community (Korybski, 2000; Bois, 1966) can enlighten us. We can connect with Socrates for ideas but also with Caligula and symbolically resurrect either moral extreme for integration into our here and now purposes. Since mediated signs separate us from nature (Burke, 1968), in contemporary North American life, the environmental proliferation of the media must be deciphered far more than it previously has been. Our worldview and values come largely from our mediated environment, especially television (Baran, 2007). Television alone now provides us with around a thousand stations: enough for seclusion from childhood to antiquity. Our televised world can broadcast prosocial (Dumova & Fiordo, 2007) as well as antisocial content. Yet, nature, when experienced, may be enjoyed and endured: its heat, cold, pests, dangers, pleasures, and pains. Thoreau experienced his pond; today he might view a video of his pond. Monks have observed a fish rotting to learn the ultimate path of all life; today the rotting fish might be available on the Web to experience without the odors. …