Metacommunications
In response to my further brain storm of technological determinism and cultural materialism, after some reconsidering - I feel that these two schools although quite different, are both part of the same process. Both need each other, on one side are technology used to govern our lives whilst the other idea is convinced that technology, man-made technology is designed because there is a need for it. We've seen around us that both sorts of technology exists in our world, some scholars focus particularly on media technology when this term technology has co-existed with humanity since the stone age.
This term media ecology represents a sort of environment, a representation of many elements, complex processes and ideas. This sees the relationship of the media with different modes of information, technics and codes of communication. Simply put, decades ago the power of the media is much stronger than what it used to be, the media forms ideas to the public and there wasn't quite as many choice of media and communication as it is now. Media ecology sees the environment as a constant balance between all these elements and forms - now with the existence of social networking, Wikileaks and the world wide web, it tips the balance of the media ecology in an extraordinary way, a new age in which the public sphere has a form of defense and critical power over what is written in the press.
But is this perhaps a good thing or a bad thing? I feel it is a good thing that the public has some form of control over ourselves as opposed to having no voice in our daily lives. But this could also mean that this power could be easily misused. Take for example the kid and his POLICE BRUTALITY during this year's Sydney Mardi Gras. The footage is raw, the media easily manipulated the footage to place blame on the police officer when in actual fact, viewing the footage raw allows the audience to form their own opinion on the issue. We trace back a few years ago and we could see that such an incident may not have such mixed opinions as we're fixed to view the situation over a few specialised outlets.
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