Please have a listen to this week’s episode of Team Human, with my friend and collaborator, the fabulous Media Studies professor Kathryn Fry. I’ve shared some excerpts below, but you can hear the whole thing by clicking on this link.

Douglas Rushkoff How do you explain what “media ecology” is to people?

Katherine Fry I always have a lot of problems explaining it to people, but I guess if I were to describe it briefly, I would say that media ecology is the study of how media create cultural environments, and how there’s a lot of emphasis on media forms and how they direct the way that we see the world and think about the world — and that’s in opposition to how most people study media, which is the content alone. Media ecology looks at it from a much broader perspective.

Rushkoff Right. So if you were looking at TV, it wouldn’t just be, “Oh, let’s analyze all these sitcoms for their relationship to the family, or to race, or to economics,” but rather “what is it like to live in a world with television?”

Fry Right, exactly. And it reminds me of a story that Neil Postman told at a conference when way back in like 1994, 1995. Todd Gitlin happened to be at that same conference, and they were having a bit of a spar. And they were discussing the fact that there was this study done about a town in Canada, I believe it was, that had never had access to television. And then television was introduced.

And they were talking about the difference in that small culture, that community, over a 10 year period. And Todd Gitlin, of course, was coming down on the side of, “well, yeah, because they had all this content coming into their homes — they had all this news and information.” And Neil Postman said, “no, it’s because they had television.” It just completely reorganized who they were as a culture or as a community.

That’s a really good example I would say of what media ecologists are interested in. They step outside of the content. I mean, content is important; you can’t ignore content. But you can put it in its place alongside all the rest of the other factors, all the other components that make up a culture where you have certain dominant forms of media.

Rushkoff And the way people make content or think about content is going to be different in different media environments. Don Quixote is different than, you know, the Truman Show, even though they are expressing similar concerns about media.

Fry Yes, as one example, absolutely. Yeah. Another way to describe it is, well, you need to understand how a medium shapes the content and even makes, like what you just said, some content even possible.

A medium makes a kind of content possible. Other media do not make it possible. So there are certain ideas and ways of seeing the world that are simply not possible through print media, for example. It’s just not possible to access something that you had referred to earlier, like a picture of a child in a womb. Like that’s not a print media phenomenon, but you can access it through a completely different sort of medium, which is what a sonogram is. It’s a medium.

Rushkoff Your relationship to your baby — the first time you see your baby is now that weird little black and white, demon child.

Fry Exactly. And all the rest of the things that you can probe with medical tools, and the way that people perform medical operations and even from afar. This is all media related. This is all part of the environment that we’re in. And I think media ecology is so great because it takes into account all of these various different technologies or techniques.

Rushkoff And for me, where it’s the most interesting is the way that certain things get kind of naturalized by a medium. Like how Mumford wrote about when they put the clock on the tower in the medieval village was the same time that they started paying people by the hour.

It was a way of making hourly wages — working by the hour — seem natural. A part of your world. “Oh, there’s the clock. It’s the thing.” It’s interesting that we keep doing that. And if you’re alive when it happens, you notice the new thing. Like, we notice smartphones all over the place. But if you’re born with them, it’s just…you can’t imagine a world without them. It’s just the way things are.

Fry It’s just part of your natural world. Exactly. And that’s a really, that’s a good way of explaining it to young people, because they didn’t grow up with the same kind of tools that we had access to, that we relied on — which in effect makes us very different people.

And that’s a point I try to make with students all the time: you are a very different kind of person than I am. That doesn’t mean that we can’t examine things together and talk about them, but I have a perspective that’s different because my media environment was very, very different from yours. And there’s no judgment to that at all. It’s just say, you know, I’m not saying there’s better and worse. That’s not the way to enter those conversations. I’m just saying it’s very different.

So let’s talk about that difference.

* * *

Fry Just teaching people how to deconstruct messages is the low hanging fruit of what I think media literacy can do and be. It’s very shallow. And I need to explain what I mean by that. It’s really important that people be able to, for example, look at a commercial, look at a film, pay attention to a news program wherever they encounter it, and be able to pick out what’s going on in the content that’s leading me towards certain conclusions.

That’s absolutely essential. But if you’re just doing that, you’re not getting into the deeper issues. There’s not a deep understanding. So let me give an example: I have a big thing about the way in which people do media literacy, where they’re teaching people how to fact-check and to pick out disinformation and misinformation. That’s really hot right now. It’s been hot since, you know, Trump was first elected.

Rushkoff Right. Dis- mis- and mal- information, right? This or that. It’s all very defined. But I get there’s a difference: one is a sort of intentional misinformation, one’s unintentional and one’s more like hacking.

Fry Yeah, and all of it. Okay, it’s problematic, and we need to understand what it is. But there’s always hidden in that argument, this notion that there is a truth that exists out there, and it’s knowable. And all you need to do is have the skills of figuring out where the lies are in the message. And, I don’t even know where to start unpacking it, except to say:

Whose truth are we talking about here? And in what context is something truthful? You know, for whom is it truthful and when?

* * *

Rushkoff Not to be a media determinist, but do you think stuff like Trump and the alt right, or the seeming dissolution of institutions and government are a result of interactive media?

Fry Yeah, yes. And I think you’re right to say, let’s not call ourselves technological determinists, right? Because things always work in a connected way as opposed to a linear way.

But it’s created an environment where people have access to new ideas and people whose voices were muffled before are now being heard. And that’s very, very scary to people who, for whom the status quo is advantageous. Rich white men, you know, just to use an example — or just the patriarchal system. That’s all been challenged and there’s a lot of fear attached to that. People get scared, and I hope nobody takes this the wrong way when I say this, but I get why the January 6th thing happened. I get it.

It was terrible and terrifying. And it made a mockery of our democracy. But I understand a little bit about how those people got to that desperate point. And Trump was the person who could then allow them to amplify all of their fears. And all of it happened on social media.

All of it happened because of our media environment. So yeah, so you’ve got a massive change in paradigms of understanding, and a massive shift in power: Oh no, you know, this makes me feel really, really unsure and restless and I’m really angry. And this guy is like telling me where my anger needs to be funneled to…