Maybe I can blame it on my brain still being on vacation mode, or having a busy first few weeks. But whatever the reason, I have had the most difficult time figuring out what precisely a media ecology is, and how to find one to study for our class project. So here, I’m simply going to attempt putting the various thoughts I’ve had over the first two weeks into a structure that will hopefully clarify for myself (and maybe for my fellow students) the main point of this class.
Matthew Fuller seems to offer the simplest explanation of what an ecology is in general: “the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter (Fuller 2).” Ok, easy enough. But later in his text, Fuller specifies a media ecology as the use of media to create a consensus of human culture (Fuller 4). I was somewhat puzzled by this until it occurred to me that media is a collection of human-produced artifacts in various mediums, meant to express ideas through a shared framework of understanding with other human beings. The shared framework of understanding would be culture; thus, media can be seen as a collection of concrete artifacts produced by/affecting/in communication with culture, and so studying it is akin to studying a physical manifestation of human culture.
Going from here, I still was struggling to figure out how a physical location could participate in a media ecology. This is where, I believe, Jane Bennett’s theory of affect is supposed to come in. She describes affect as the capability to feel force without subjective emotion (xii), and relates it to her idea of thing-power, that objects have agency outside of their use in human activity. Thinking of how to relate this to places, I thought of some discussions I had in previous classes. One was with a professor whose driving academic thesis was that climate change plays a central role in the violence rampant in the Middle East. He explained to the class that environmental factors, like water availability, can deter human settlement or produce fierce competition among the people who live there for those limited resources. Another less big-picture observation in my Science of Technology class was how little details of our physical environments have large impacts, such as how lighting or color affects our mood.
So using those observations, physical objects and places can drive human action, explaining how a geographical location can be a site of study for social issues. In terms of bringing a sense of “media ecology” into this, I suppose that we will make use of these environments and the objects affecting them to create different media, which will communicate together as an ecology to reflect the social issue at hand. To put this in a concrete example, my current concept for my class project is to use the Maria Hernandez dog park in Bushwick as my site of study. I would investigate how this site acts as both a microcosm and agent in the field of pet ownership as an indicator of economic privilege. For example, the park and its objects might affect pet ownership by its proximity (in terms of walking distance) to dog owners, its size, its type and amount of debris, et cetera. As a microcosm, I would look at how the park is affected by local and citywide pet policies, the number and respective wealth of its local dog owners, and so on. Both of these would inform the media pieces I create to reflect and share my observations, which together would constitute a media ecology of that ecology- if any of this makes sense.
I think writing this blog post has helped me understand what the goals of this class project are a little better- and if my understanding is wrong, I hope at least having this framework will help me better understand where I’m wrong. I guess we’ll see what comes next.
– Theresa
Works Cited
Bennett, Jane. “Preface.” Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. vii-xix. Print.
Fuller, Matthew, and Roger Malina F. “Introduction: Media Ecologies.” Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005. 1-5. Print.
Digital Media Theory 
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