Everything is Media Ecology...
The field of media ecology was formally created in 1968 by Neil Postman. Postman coined the term to describe how communication technologies shape human environments and influence how people think, act, and live. While Marshall McLuhan had explored related concepts earlier, Postman is credited with establishing media ecology as a distinct field of study.
The term "public relations" first appeared in the 1897 Year Book of Railway Literature. However, the practice of public relations, even if not explicitly termed as such, has roots much further back, with examples found in ancient civilizations and throughout history. The formalization of public relations as a profession is generally traced to the early 20th century, particularly with the work of individuals like Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays.
“I encounter forms of this attitude every day. The producers who work at the Ostankino channels might all be liberals in their private lives, holiday in Tuscany, and be completely European in their tastes. When I ask how they marry their professional and personal lives, they look at me as if I were a fool and answer: “Over the last twenty years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.” “Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as “human rights” and “freedom” as a blunder. “Can’t you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?” they ask me. I try to protest—but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated. Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colors, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act.
Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching “modernization” to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: “managed democracy,” “conservative modernization.” Then he steps back, smiling, and says: “We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself.” And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle.” ― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, year 2014
Public Relations is top-down, the content creator trickles down to the consumer of content.
Media Ecology is all-inclusive. Where do the content creators get their ideas, what is the food chain of media? We The People all inclusive democracy study.
Where did the Torah media, Synagogue venue, come from?
Where did the Bible media, Church venue, come from?
Where did the Quran media, Mosque venue, come from?
Mecca media theme park (like Disney media theme park)
"Dr. Joseph Campbell - Inward Journey: Schizophrenia and Mythology"
"National Educational Radio presents the Cooper Union Forum, a program recorded at the Great Hall of the Cooper Union in New York City by station WNYC. This presentation, a lecture by Dr. Joseph Campbell entitled "Inward Journey: Schizophrenia and Mythology" is introduced by Dr. Johnson Fairchild."
Topic is John Weir Perry Psychiatrist contacting Joseph Campbell at Sarah Lawrence College about his 1949 book of comparative mythology.
51 minute audio lecture:
https://www.wnyc.org/story/dr-joseph-campbell-inward-journey-schizophrenia-and-mythology/
NOTE: I may have also encounterd this lecture, or a varation of this lecture, from the Joseph Campbell Foundation before locating it free on the WNYC website. "Lecture I.2.2 The Inward Journey" at JCF.
Consumers of the latest media can trap themselves in filter bubbles, getting entirely different views of the world from the media they consume. "Echo chambers".
I have also used a term "Context Bewilderment", in reference to a description of social behavior from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
(Repeating) Consumers of the latest media can trap themselves in filter bubbles, getting entirely different views of the world from the media they consume. "Echo chambers".
Campbell was a writer and had an IBM PC, And switching applications between a word processor and a spreadsheet application - the commands were entirely different. A modern user might compare this with switching between Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft Windows on the same computer. or between two different video games with completely different controls (a Nintendo Wii game console playing bowling or tennis simulation, say vs. Half Life on a PC computer with a keyboard).
I, Stephen Alfred Gutknecht, am a published author on operating systems / computers. And I find it fascinating that a retired professor from Sarah Lawrence College, who is not raised on personal computers - was able to see this metaphor of one app at a time DOS interface systems. In the Bill Moyers website telling of this interview, Campbell mentioned a command line shell insruction to load the IBM Displaywrite app. "You buy a certain software, and there’s a whole set of signals that lead to the achievement of your aim, you know. And once you’ve set it for, let’s say, DW3, enter"
Based on my own personal expertise of the era, this is a reference to the 1985 application IBM Displaywrite 3 - and Bill Moyers in the introduction says the Skywalker Ranch interviews with Joseph Campbell were filmed in the summer of 1986 and summer of 1987 before Campbell died and the 1988 airing of the series and publication of the book.
So Campbell is describing using IBM PC-DOS or MS-DOS and typing "DW3" [enter] (four keystrokes) to launch an application from the command line. How at that time, different personal computer applications (such as Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application, released since January 1983) had radially different internal command and user interfaces. So, it seems, that an 82 year old professor of Combative Mythology who had authored 40 books was still an old dog learning new book authoring tricks in Hawaii, to use a general-purpose operating systems (IBM PC-DOS / Microsoft MS-DOS) and exiting one application and loading another.
I graduated high school in 1988 in Fort Wayne, Indiana - and this aired June 21, 1988. I seriously returned to the series in 2009 before predicting the Arab Spring in December 2009 from Austin, Texas... anyway, onto the metaphor of echo chambers of religions and user interface and command signals...
When two Echo Chambers meet...when different religions meet, different systems of religion, one based on female, one based on male...
Joseph Campbell at age 83 in year 1987, Power of Myth book published 1988:
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I have had a revelation from my computer about mythology. You buy a certain software, and there is a whole set of signals that lead to the achievement of your aim. If you begin fooling around with signals that belong to another system of software, they just won’t work.
Similarly, in mythology—if you have a mythology in which the metaphor for the mystery is the father, you are going to have a different set of signals from what you would have if the metaphor for the wisdom and mystery of the world were the mother. And they are two perfectly good metaphors. Neither one is a fact. These are metaphors. It is as though the universe were my father. It is as though the universe were my mother. Jesus says, “No one gets to the father but by me.” The father that he was talking about was the biblical father. It might be that you can get to the father only by way of Jesus. On the other hand, suppose you are going by way of the mother. There you might prefer Kali, and the hymns to the goddess, and so forth. That is simply another way to get to the mystery of your life. You must understand that each religion is a kind of software that has its own set of signals and will work.
If a person is really involved in a religion and really building his life on it, he better stay with the software that he has got. But a chap like myself, who likes to play with the software—well, I can run around, but I probably will never have an experience comparable to that of a saint.
BILL MOYERS: But haven’t some of the greatest saints borrowed from anywhere they could? They have taken from this and from that, and constructed a new software.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That is what is called the development of a religion. You can see it in the Bible. In the beginning, God was simply the most powerful god among many. He is just a local tribal god. And then in the sixth century, when the Jews were in Babylon, the notion of a world savior came in, and the biblical divinity moved into a new dimension.
You can keep an old tradition going only by renewing it in terms of current circumstances. In the period of the Old Testament, the world was a little three-layer cake, consisting of a few hundred miles around the Near Eastern centers. No one had ever heard of the Aztecs, or even of the Chinese. When the world changes, then the religion has to be transformed.
BILL MOYERS: But it seems to me that is in fact what we are doing.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That is in fact what we had better do. But my notion of the real horror today is what you see in Beirut. There you have the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and because the three of them have three different names for the same biblical god, they can’t get on together. They are stuck with their metaphor and don’t realize its reference. They haven’t allowed the circle that surrounds them to open. It is a closed circle. Each group says, “We are the chosen group, and we have God.” Look at Ireland. A group of Protestants was moved to Ireland in the seventeenth century by Cromwell, and it never has opened up to the Catholic majority there. The Catholics and Protestants represent two totally different social systems, two different ideals.
BILL MOYERS: Each needs a new myth.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Each needs its own myth, all the way. Love thine enemy. Open up. Don’t judge. All things are Buddha things. It is there in the myth. It is already there.
Joseph Campbell's 1987 example of using "DW3" with MS-DOS / PC-DOS echos by an entirely different author.
Timothy Leary; quoted in Bukatman 1993; page 139
"Computers are the most subversive thing I've ever done. [...] Computers are more addictive than heroin. [...] People need some way to activate, boot up, and change disks in their minds. In the 60s we needed LSD to expand reality and examine our stereotypes. With computers as our mirrors, LSD might not be necessary now"
Leary: "boot up, and change disks in their minds".. exact same metaphor as Joseph Campbell in 1987 being used. Switching software with our same brain hardware. A video game console changing from one game to another, changing out game cartridge, floppy disk, or optical disc.
Timothy Finnegan
Joseph Campbell's Comparative Mythology was translating rituals and subconscious from religion to religion, at a deeper mind and society level than translating spoken and written languages from language to language. Funeral ritual from Tibet sky burial བྱ་གཏོར translation to say a Finnegans Wake Tim Finnegan Funeral...
Did Timothy Leary say "LSD might not be necessary now"... well University of Toronto's Marshall McLuhan said "So I have begun to feel that LSD may just be the lazy man's form of Finnegans Wake.” - and Joseph Campbell was a Joycean, as was his spouse Joycean Jean Erdman - a pair of James Joyce enthusiasts!