Media Ecology Conference Paper

Later this month, St. Mary’s College of California will host the 18th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association. The conference theme is “Technology, Spirituality, Ecology.” My paper proposal was accepted. The abstract is below

Title: A Communicative Cosmos: Toward a Whiteheadian Media Ecology
Author: Matthew T. Segall, PhD
Affiliation: California Institute of Integral Studies
Contact: msegall@ciis.edu
415-575-6104

In this paper, I draw upon Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy in an attempt to expand the scope of media ecology beyond the exclusively humanistic charter given it by Neil Postman into more cosmic and divine waters. Postman defined media ecology as the critical study of how media technologies envelope and form cultures. He argued that human beings live in two different worlds: a natural environment and a media environment. At the dawn of the Anthropocene, such a bifurcation between nature and culture can no longer be taken for granted. If there ever was a salient distinction to be made between art and nature, advances in biotechnology and the severity of the ecological crisis have now irrevocably entangled cultural productions with physical processes. This paper builds on the process-relational cosmology of Whitehead, as well as recent work by media theorists including Mark B. N. Hansen, John D. Peters, and Andrew Murphie, to argue that the world itself is already a medium and thus can be conceived of as an evolving network of communicative processes in its own right. Recognizing that humans represent only one of the cosmos’ many forms of communicative being, and that basic semiotic processes (what Whitehead calls “prehensions”) operate even at the level of quantum events, opens up new theoretical perspectives on the study of media as environment and environment as media. Further, and relevant to this conference’s theme, becoming conscious of a communicative cosmos has profound technological, ecological, and perhaps even spiritual implications.