{EME} 2006 pp.

5-14
ISSN 1539-7785
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All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

M E D I A E C O L O G Y E D U C AT I O N
Neil Postman
In a keynote address delivered to the Speech Communication Association in 1973,
Neil Postman discussed the new graduate program in media ecology that he estab-
lished in New York University's School of Education. Media ecology is presented as
a field of inquiry based on the metaphor that all communication is an environment,
and utilizing a methodology called context analysis. Discussing communication envi-
ronments as systems with boundaries, in relation to suprasystems and subsystems,
Postman also considered the question of how technology affects human perception,
feeling, and value.

I would like to begin by acknowledging that my presence here tonight constitutes

my first serious connection with the Speech Communication Association. I have
little doubt that the SCA will survive the encounter. And I have even less doubt
that I will be the chief beneficiary of that encounter, especially because I plan to
stay around long enough to hear people other than myself do some talking. This
is not said, by the way, as ritualistic self-deprecation. As you will hear in a
moment, my colleagues, students, and I at NYU [New York University] are
engaged in a kind of perilous adventure in the field of communication, and we
need the advice, empathetic criticism, and psychic support that only the members
of this organization are qualified to give. And so, although I am the keynote
speaker at your conference, I come not to bring you the word, which I don’t have,
but rather a whole bunch of question marks that probably you don’t need.
Nevertheless, I do so in the sincere hope that some of you, by knowing our situ-
ation, might help us to find our way to a few creative solutions. Specifically, what
I would like to do is tell you about the foolhardy, presumptuous, and exhilarating
effort we are making at NYU to elaborate a new perspective for studying com-
munication; one that might still make some sense 20 or 30 years from now. In
effect, what we’re trying to do is work within a new structure for understanding
the communication process—a structure that reflects the powerful trend toward
reorganizing knowledge along the lines suggested by an ecological perspective.
Now, as you may be aware, universities are not always sympathetic to such reor-
ganizing efforts, perhaps because with age they suffer from the hardening of the
categories. Kenneth Boulding (1956) says in his book, The Image:

Direct all correspondence to: Elaine Markson Literary Agency, 44 Greenwich Ave., New York, NY 10011.

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 Postman: Media Ecology Education

It will be a long time . . . before the restructuring of knowledge which now seems to
be underway will be reflected in the organization of the universities. Indeed, it is dif-
ficult to visualize now exactly what the appropriate organization would be. There can
be little doubt, however, that [this restructuring] will eventually be recognized offi-
cially. Until then, the new structures, as new…structures have always done, will have
to live in an underworld, an underworld of deviant professors, gifted amateurs, and
moderate crackpots. (p. 163)

Let’s skip the question as to which of these categories I most rightly belong. It
is enough to say that at the School of Education at NYU, a most hospitable recep-
tion has been given to those of us who have shown a serious interest in doing
something unusual in communication. At almost every turn, encouragement has
been freely offered by administrators and faculty. We have even been allowed to
invent a new name for our subject—Media Ecology. And one of the more delight-
ful rewards we have reaped is the fact that both our name and our “course of
study” such as it is, were adopted whole by Oxford University last summer. We
were encouraged, too, by the fact that Harvard University published this year the
final report of its Program on Technology and Society. Since that program was
established to begin inquiries into many of the same matters we at NYU are con-
cerned with, we have almost begun to feel that we are part of the official knowl-
edge establishment. As many of you know, even those in the academic under-
world need stroking, and to receive positive reinforcement from the two greatest
universities in the Western world—well, it is almost too much to bear.
But one must do more than bear it; one must be suspicious of it. All the Oxfords
and the Harvards and the NYUs in the world cannot change the fact that all com-
munication as a science and/or discipline just barely exists, if it exists at all; and our
colleagues from more settled disciplines are right in viewing us with circumspec-
tion. As Gregory Bateson (1972) puts it, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, those of
us in communication are explorers, and “in the nature of the case, the explorer can
never know what he is exploring until it has been explored” (p. xvi). Among other
things, that implies that an exploration can, after all, end up badly. And I don't
mean by “badly” that you start out looking for spice in China and end up in
Puerto Rico. I mean your ship may quite easily hit a rock as you leave the harbor
and sink within sight of shore. You never know, at the beginning, if you will find
glory and riches or end up a laughing stock in Davy Jones’s locker.
But an explorer does at least have a plan and sometimes, a great notion. Well, at
NYU we may not have a great notion, or even a plan, but we certainly have a start-
ing point. What that starting point is can be stated in many ways, but I am partic-
ularly partial to its expression in Kinesics and Context, by Ray Birdwhistell (1970).
This is what he says:

A human being is not a black box with one orifice for emitting a chunk of stuff called
communication and another for receiving it. And, at the same time, communication is
not simply the sum of the bits of information which pass between two people in a
given period of time. (p. 3)

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Now, as long as communication is conceived as a chunk of stuff, moving this

way and that in countable quanta, there is probably no need for a new approach
to communication, or any approach, for that matter. Each of several academic dis-
ciplines—for example, physics, linguistics, psychology, sociology, literary criti-
cism, semantics, and logic—can supply a language and a perspective to describe
pieces of the chunk. But once an atomistic view of communication is rejected and
in its place is substituted an ecological view, you have an entirely new set of prob-
lems for which there are no readily available conceptual handles. What you need,
when you come right down to it, is a new paradigm. A paradigm, as you know, is
a perspective or a model or even a metaphor that serves to define the legitimate
problems and appropriate methods of a field of study. Aristotle’s Physics,
Newton’s Optics, Franklin’s Electricity, and Lavoisier’s Chemistry were such par-
adigms. Each of them gave rise to a scholarly tradition, and permitted the passage
into maturity of each of their respective fields. But history tells that the road to a
firm paradigm consensus is exceedingly arduous, and this is especially so in the
social sciences. Take psychology, for example. At the present time, there are at
least three important paradigms competing to pre-empt the field. First, there is the
tradition begun by Watson and Hull, but that is now known as “Skinnerian.”
Second, there is the tradition known as “Freudian.” And third, there is a relative
newcomer, called “Rogerian,” or “Maslovian.” Each paradigm has its faithful
adherents who look with disdain on those who are faithful to the others. Each par-
adigm starts from a different set of postulates and has a unique language:
Freudians talk about instincts, Rogerians talk about needs, and Skinnerians talk
about contingencies. They barely understand each other, or even want to.
Somewhat the same situation exists in the field of communication, where we
have several similar paradigms, each with its own special language and adherents.
We are all familiar, I suspect, with the Shannon–Weaver–Norbert Wiener para-
digm, which talks about communication in terms of noise, redundancy, informa-
tion overload, and feedback. And I assume we also know about the Birdwhistell
(1970) paradigm, which uses the methodology and some of the language of struc-
tural linguistics as a basis for describing nonverbal behavior or, as Birdwhistell
calls it, kinesics. Then there is Erving Goffman’s (1959) paradigm, which he calls
a dramaturgical model because he likens interpersonal transactions to theatrical
presentations. And there is also the McLuhan–Jacques Ellul paradigm, in which
all human behavior is understood as a function of the dominant communication
technologies of a culture. There are, of course, a dozen others that anyone in this
room could name, including those of Eric Berne, David Berlo, Harold Lasswell,
and Edward Hall. But in reviewing these paradigms as thoroughly as we were
able, which is an education in itself, it occurred to us that each one of them is seri-
ously limited in one respect or another. Some are merely special cases of larger
paradigms. Some are based on purely atomistic assumptions. Most are unable to
cope with the full range of communication transactions that we want to know
something about. Information theory, for example, is very useful in looking into
machine–machine communication, but it is, first of all, based on a mechanistic
input–output metaphor and is, second, next to useless in describing human com-
munication. Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical metaphor is quite promising in a
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number of ways, but it is actually a special case of the role-playing paradigm, and
it has nothing to say about men and their technologies. McLuhan has plenty to say
about that, of course, but almost nothing sensible about anything else. Moreover,
his methods are so idiosyncratic that anyone wishing to use his paradigm would
hardly know how to behave him or herself, scientifically speaking.
So what we have tried to do is select a paradigm—in this case, a metaphor—that
would reflect a holistic perspective, that would comprehend all communication
transactions, and that would be useful in organizing research into the widest vari-
ety of communication situations. The metaphor we chose, as you might infer from
the name media ecology, is, of course, that all communication is an environment.
By adopting this perspective, we are not only rejecting the idea that communica-
tion is a chunk of stuff, but also the idea that communication takes place in an
environment. What we are putting forward is the idea that communication is an
environment, from which we have concluded that the study of communication is,
or should be, one of the ecological sciences.
Now, I do not suppose that this metaphor will strike any of you as especially
startling. Every one of us has come across it before. For example, Edward Hall is
not far from it, and Marshall McLuhan probably means something like it when he
says that the medium is the message. Birdwhistell (1970) certainly does when he
defines communication as “that system through which human beings establish a
predictable continuity in life” (p. 14). But what is distinctive, we think, in what we
are trying to do at NYU is that we have assembled a community of teachers and
students who have committed themselves to rigorously exploring the ecological
paradigm to see how far it can take us, and in what directions. By “rigorously
exploring,” I mean that in all our research, in all our courses, in all our discussions,
and in all our writing, much of which is contained in our publication, The Media
Ecology Review, we start from the premise that every communication system and
process is connected with every other communication system and process in a
complex network, and that the study of communication processes is the study, not
of elements, but of elements in relationships. Thus, our attention is focused not on
who says what to whom through what medium, and so on, but on how the who,
what, whom, and medium are interrelated. From the ecological perspective, con-
tent analysis, for example, is viewed as either trivial or irrelevant. What matters to
us is context, and to the extent that media ecology has, as yet, a methodology, that
methodology might be called context analysis. This implies looking at communi-
cation environments as systems within systems within systems. It means trying to
identify the significant characteristics of each system as a whole, the subsystems
of which it is composed, the larger system within which it functions, and all the
significant relationships among them. To make things even more confusing, con-
text analysis takes as its subject matter the transactions between individual and
reality, individual and individual, individual and group, group and group, group
and culture, culture and culture, and tries to see them all as functions of one anoth-
er. Moreover, context analysis, or media ecology, gives special attention to the
roles played in each of these transactions by the media through which they are
conducted. By “medium,” we mean any agent or agency through which two or
more discrete elements are linked in a transacting system. Communications media
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include, therefore, both technologies like film, radio and television, and tech-
niques, which are media composed of a set of procedures. I suppose one might call
techniques “soft” media, although they are no less compelling than technology
itself. The technique known as “operant conditioning,” for example, is a medium
that links Behavior A to Behavior B. Parliamentary procedure is a medium con-
necting event A to event B; and the medium known as Aristotelian logic links
Statement A to Statement B. Thus, from our point of view, a technology or a tech-
nique is an environment within an environment.
To try to give you a concrete illustration of how context analysis works, let me
choose the environment in which you and I presently find ourselves. To begin
with, I am reluctant to give this environment a name because, by naming it, I will
prejudice the analysis. For example, if I call this environment “The Keynote
Address,” or even “Postman’s Keynote Address,” I would impose on it the tacit
assumption that the content of Postman’s words is probably the most important
element in the environment, which is quite probably not true. Moreover, by nam-
ing the environment, “The Keynote Address,” I would effectively obscure the
role that the addressees have played in making the address what it is. Not only
that, by calling it “Postman’s Address,” I might foster the impression that the role
you play is essentially passive, a matter of merely recording what I say, which is,
of course, not what is actually happening. I don’t want to dwell on this point
beyond observing that the name one gives to the system one is looking at usually
turns out to be an element in the system itself, because it always gives some degree
of direction to the observations one will make. Let us say, then, that this environ-
ment is our keynote address, and leave it at that—although a good media ecolo-
gist would never leave it at that because one of his first concerns is to specify the
effects of his own behavior as an observer—including his naming behavior—on
the system he is observing. In any event, one of the first questions we now have
to ask is, What is the larger system of which this environment is only a part, and
what is the relationship between them? Well, obviously, this system is part of the
larger environment called the ninth annual SCA Summer Conference, and the
apparent function of this speech is to mark the beginning of the larger event. This
fact calls attention to an invariable characteristic of all communication environ-
ments, namely, that they all have boundaries—more or less arbitrary dividing lines
signifying the end of one system and the beginning of another. College graduation
ceremonies, doctoral orals, and wedding ceremonies are boundary markers of the
most obvious and formalized kind. Dressing for dinner, signing in at conventions,
and events like this speech are boundary markers of a more subtle kind. But they
all serve the same function—and that is to define the environment one is about to
enter. They signal, in effect, that a certain set of behaviors, and not others, are in
order.
One of the important functions of our keynote address, then, is to mark the
boundary between conference and nonconference. This seemingly simple obser-
vation suggests a number of interesting questions, among them, this: If this event
is primarily a boundary marker, is it the most effective structure that can be found
to do the job? Of course, to answer that question, one would have to answer the
question, “What is the function of the larger system—the ninth annual SCA
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Summer Conference?” Now that is, I’m quite sure, a complex question.
Depending on who you are, the answers will be quite different. They will range
from “I’ve always wanted to go to Chicago,” to “It’s good to have this on my
record,” to “Let’s get away from the kids for a weekend,” to “I need some con-
tacts for a job.” I doubt, incidentally, that the formally stated purpose for holding
this conference was the compelling reason for bringing most of us here. The for-
mal declaration is more in the nature of what media ecologists would call, a bind-
ing strategy, or for short, BS. Nevertheless, one of the functions of the conference
as a whole is to serve as a boundary marker within a larger system—for example,
it draws a line between those of us who are “committed speech communication
professionals” and those “ordinary, standard-brand slobs” who stayed home.
Whatever the specific functions of a particular professional conference may be,
the communication system known as a convention has certain structural charac-
teristics as a whole that are worth noting, because they serve to explain much of
the behavior that takes place inside the system. For example, in examining other
convention environments, I have come to the conclusion that they are apt to be
quite weird in that they are almost entirely closed systems—that is, environments
that are not truly connected to any larger systems. It is almost as if conventions
hover in a world of their own—beginning, middling, and ending—leaving mem-
ories but few consequences. That is why, I imagine, so much hyperbole and fan-
tasizing goes on at conventions, and occurs in all the convention’s subsystems—
hotel bars, hotel rooms, the keynote address, workshops, restaurants—wherever
the conventioneers gather. The closest parallel I can find to the communication
environment of a convention is the system that is created on airplanes when pas-
sengers engage in complex transactions. That environment begins when you enter
the plane and ends when you leave it, and except in rare cases, has no relationship
to other systems within which passengers must function. That is why, I believe, so
many people tell outrageous stories about themselves to other passengers. One
need fear only internal contradictions. There are no external implications. That is
also why the tales, fantasies, and flirtations in which one may engage on an air-
plane may be regarded as harmless. The same is true for the tales, fantasies, and
flirtations in which one may engage at a convention, because for all their differ-
ences, the airplane and the convention are structurally quite similar in that their
boundaries are extraordinarily well defined—almost, in fact, impenetrable. As
environments, they are self-contained. Now, this characteristic of conventions
helps to achieve certain purposes: it promotes, for example, a strong sense of
group identity and loyalty. At the same time, it precludes other purposes, for
example, the carryover of convention spirit and learning into the less exotic sys-
tems in which we function back home.
Of course, no communication environment is so completely closed that its
boundaries cannot be breached, although in general, the more isolated the system
is from its suprasystems, the more extreme the behavior within it must be to break
through the boundaries. And such breaks, when they do occur, are always trau-
matic. To shift the context for a moment, this is in part what the Watergate scan-
dal is about. What Haldeman, Mitchell, Erlichman, and Dean did was to create a
closed communication environment, which accounts in part for the intense team
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spirit and loyalties of which they all speak. But as their behavior became increas-
ingly bizarre, it was inevitable that their system would be penetrated by searching
inquiries from those in the larger systems surrounding the White House. The
trauma that resulted broke the closed-system to pieces, destroyed all the coordi-
nation of its elements and made it into a junk pile rather than a system. One might
even say that the entire problem of the present administration is that it assumed
that the presidency was a closed system.
But to return to our present situation, I should point out that the relative open-
ness or closedness of any system varies for different participants, by virtue of their
position and function within the system. My own position and function in this
environment, for example, imposes certain definite restrictions on the number and
quality of the fantasies I may create simply because, if someone records my
remarks or asks for a copy of my talk, I am immediately faced with the possibili-
ty of being drawn into some larger system of which this convention is only a part.
I am not saying, by the way, that I am therefore creating no fantasies, but only that
I am aware that my behavior in this environment is governed in part by my rela-
tionship to larger systems. So is yours, of course, but probably to a somewhat less-
er extent—unless you choose to do something bizarre. For example, if you should
fall asleep within the next 5 minutes, the chances are that your behavior will not
have implications beyond this room. If, however, you should stand up, remove
your clothes, and announce that you are going for a swim, I should not be sur-
prised if your wife, or your dean, or even your mother would eventually learn of
it. Should any of you do this, by the way, here’s what we’d say about it as media
ecologists: You have, first of all, misconceived the structure and function of this
environment; you have misread the boundary markers; you are an element, so to
speak, that has rejected being part of the available subsystems within this envi-
ronment; and your action will change all the relationships of all the other elements
in the environment in such a way, I suspect, as to render the original environment
untenable. You would, in short, have created a traumatic system break, or, to use
another ecological metaphor, polluted the environment beyond its capacity to
regenerate itself. Unless, of course, you do this now—in which case none of what
I just said will be true. In other words, now that I have mentioned and discussed
the possibility of such behavior, the meaning of your doing it will be entirely dif-
ferent from what it might have been before. The context, you see, always deter-
mines the significance of the content.
But the context of any communication environment is only partly defined by
the larger system in which it functions. It is also defined by the smaller systems
that make up the environment, and the relations among them. This leads to the
question, “What are the subsystems that comprise our present environment?” I
am, myself, an obvious subsystem, and so are you, and if we inquire into both our
purposes for being here, and our functions in this system, we will undoubtedly
uncover important information about the environment as a whole. For example,
from a functional point of view, it wouldn’t make much difference if I fall asleep
in the next 5 minutes, or take off my clothes. Either way, I induce a traumatic sys-
tem break. In other words, the variations in the functions of subsystems explain
the range of permissible behaviors within the environment. Moreover, when we
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ask about the effects of our physical arrangement—including the vantage points
from which we see or hear each other—we learn even more. And when we inquire
into the technologies that are part of this environment—whether it is the micro-
phone in front of me or the taperecorder you hold—we learn still more about
what this environment is all about and how it is shaping up and shaping us. For
example, how would I be different if I were being videotaped? How would you
be different if you were watching a videotape instead of me in the flesh? Would
you be offended? Would you be more engrossed? Would I seem to speak with
more authority? Would you feel more free to talk to the person next to you, and
if so, how would that affect your relationship with the other people around you
now, and with me? What is the most effective medium to use in order to link you
and me and everyone else here in a single system with a common goal? This last
question is especially fascinating to media ecologists, and we have been most con-
cerned to find out something about the relationship between the people in a com-
munication environment and the technology they are using. Because most of you
are teachers, I am sure you have noticed, for example, that the fastest possible way
to lose the coordinated attention of a group is to pass out written material while
you are talking. Print is the isolating medium par excellence. It creates a special
environment all its own, resulting in the temporary suspension of all the impera-
tives of larger communication environments around it. And there is no point
either in telling your audience not to look at the printed material until you have
finished talking. So far as we have been able to determine for most people, print
will win the competition for attention with speech in most contexts. Perhaps that
is why most teachers insist on reading aloud to students whatever is contained in
printed material they hand out. They must intuitively sense that the only way to
maintain control over a print environment is to superimpose on it their own voice.
I might add here, in case you are interested, that our initial research indicates that
in the competition among media for people’s attention, the telephone wins hands
down in just about every context. We even have testimony to the fact that the act
of love can be terminated instantly by the ring a telephone. In media ecology, we
call this telephonis interruptis. Less serious, but equally revealing is the fact that on
two occasions in the past year, bank robbers in the actual process of being sur-
rounded by police, took time out to answer phone calls placed by curious
reporters. One of the bank robbers actually said, “Could you call back later? I’m
busy now.”
This question—“How does technology affect human perception, feeling, and
value?”—has been almost a preoccupation with us. It is difficult enough to ana-
lyze a communication environment such as this keynote speech, or a courtroom,
or a classroom, or a business office. But in such environments, the rules of inter-
action are usually quite explicit and sometimes even formally stated. However, in
the case of technologically created environments—that is, the relationship
between people and their radios, films, television, telephones, computers, and the
like—the rules of interaction are mostly hidden from view and are next to impos-
sible to uncover. This is probably due to the fact that we are so easily distracted
by the content of these media. The compelling question always seems to be, What
is the message? Or, What is the movie about? But, of course, what the media ecol-
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ogist wants to know is how media environments work—how they structure what
we see and say, and, therefore, do, and how this structuring changes as the media
themselves move from one environment to another. A very difficult task. But the
difficulty of it has not stopped us from asking some of the big questions. For
example, “In what ways does technology generate social change?” “What are the
consequences of new communication environments—from computers to com-
munes—for education, politics, literature, and religion?” “In what ways do speed-
ed-up communication environments affect interpersonal relationships?” “What
role does language itself play in conserving social institutions?”
In trying to answer these questions, our ecological paradigm has been exciting-
ly useful. But lest you start wondering where are all the question marks I prom-
ised, let me say that we have been unable, so far, to develop a workable taxonomy.
Our theories, such as they are, are woefully weak—sometimes tautological or
simply trivial. Our methods of context analysis are still gross and eclectic. The
results of our analyses are frequently so complex that we hardly know how to
organize what we have observed. There are times, frankly, when we wish that
communication was, after all, a chunk of stuff. But, of course, we carry on, and by
“we” I mean mostly the students in our program. And before concluding, I would
like to say a word about them. To begin with, I have the impression that I was in
fact invited here not so much to talk about communication, but to say something
about communication education. Well, although it may not have sounded like it,
I think I have. You see, the fact that media ecology is in such an underdeveloped
condition makes it all the more useful in schools—at all levels—as an approach to
communication. Media ecology is not yet a “subject,” and may not be one for
decades still to come. Media ecology is a field of inquiry; and fields of inquiry
imply the active pursuit of knowledge. Discoveries. Explorations. Errors.
Uncertainty. Change. New questions. New terms. New definitions. In short,
media ecology is, itself, an open system, which, as I see it, should be the main char-
acteristic of the curriculum of the future. A subject, on the other hand, is too often
closed. It implies a well-ordered and stable content, a parceling out of informa-
tion, an act of ventriloquizing someone else’s answers to someone else’s questions.
But in media ecology, we offer students an environment, including a paradigm,
that permits them to think and invent in ways that are too often closed to them in
more settled disciplines and approaches. In a way, you might say that students in
media ecology and other underworld enterprises will be the knowledge organiz-
ers of the future, no matter how tentative their scholarship must be today.
Which reminds me of the wonderful exchange between Justice Holmes and
John Dewey—a sort of paradigm itself for life in the academic underworld: Justice
Holmes said, “Professor Dewey, I think your early writing was clearer than your
later writing.” “Yes,” said Dewey, “then I was digging down three inches; now I’m
trying to dig three feet.” “Ah, yes,” said Holmes. “When I’ve stopped to think,
I’m very lucid.”
I would sincerely like to invite any of you who are willing to forgo lucid-
ity to help us or join us in our digging.
Thank you.

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Re fe re n c e s
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychia-
try, evolution, and epistemology. San Francisco, CA: Chandler.
Birdwhistell, R. (1970). Kinesics and context: Essays on body motion communication.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Boulding, K. (1956). The image: Knowledge in life and society. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor Books.

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