"Media Ecology Is General Semantics Writ Large"
media ecology #2
How closely linked is Media Ecology to General Semantics? Well, when I tried to find the text of the 1968 speech in which Neil Postman coined the former term, the first .pdf that came up was from the New York Society for General Semantics. When I visit that website’s “Links and Resources” page, the first link goes to the Institute of General Semantics; the second goes to the Media Ecology Association. In another talk from circa 1974, which I found simply by continuing to crawl around the web site of these thorough and helpful New York General Semanticists, Postman addresses the linkage of the two tendencies as follows: “Media Ecology is General Semantics writ large.” Maybe if we look at these two talks — the 1968 talk that gave us “media ecology,” and the 1974 one that established its relationship of near-identity with General Semantics — we can get a preliminary handle on both things.
In the 1968 talk, Postman sounds very much his Teaching as a Subversive Activity era cool-yung-prof-who’s-down-with-the-Revolution self. He writes:
I will not take time here to catalog the shortcomings of English. If you have not already noticed that English is withering away, being consumed by its own irrelevance, the chances are slim that I can make you see that this is, in fact, the case. I do want to point out, however, that what happens in school should have survival value (or what’s an education for?) and that the soundest reason for having such a subject as English has always been that children need to be competent in using and understanding the dominant communication media of tehir own culture. When these media were largely limited to such forms as novels, poems, and essays, the content of English made some sense. My purpose here is to suggest an alternative to English for the high school of 1980 when we will be so deeply immersed in the nuclear space age.
Postman is still on the way to his point, but I’m going to pause here for a moment. It makes one wince a little to read these words in 2025, when English has squandered a relatively strong position among the academic disciplines in large part because it has chased Relevance with the avidity of a crack fiend since roughly the moment Postman wrote this. “Major in English!” we all but beg. “You know that stuff you do on the internet all day? That’s English! You know how you and your friends watch movies and comment on them? That’s English!” Our eyes grow bigger and glassier. “It’s all English! Everything you do is always already English! Please just minor!” We smile, wolfish. “It won’t be any work! You’ll barely know we’re there! Or that you are!”
And our students are very familiar with the notion that education should help them survive; they’ve learned this lesson too well. It’s why they refuse to study anything but business, engineering, or nursing. It’s why the mere experience of being in college adds to that middle-class hunted feeling they can’t escape anywhere.