Notes

Media Ecology, coined by McLuhan . The term was first used publicly by Neil Bozeman in 1968.

"The Media Ecology School inherited the Chicago School's focus on technology. The "media environment school" puts forward the concept of "big media", and is committed to analyzing and understanding how communication technology controls the form, quantity, speed, distribution and flow direction of information, and is committed to figuring out how such information shape or bias affects people's perception of and attitude toward the objective world.

The Toronto School is a school of communication studies co-founded in the 1960s by scholars Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis and Eric Havelock of the University of Toronto. The school focuses on the relationship between media and civilization, analyzes the bias of communication media and the new media experience brought by the virtual reality-based cyberspace and its culture, and emphasizes the impact of the balance between the temporal and spatial bias of communication media on the stability of society.

Example: Narcissus is a beautiful man in Greek mythology, he fell in love with his own reflection in the water and can not extricate himself, depressed, and died. After his death, he was transformed into a daffodil still standing by the river. Narcissus means both daffodil and is synonymous with narcissism. This example is to show that the reflection is an extension of the human body, and that this extension creates a kind of technological environment in which a person can be in but not be aware of it. Narcissus did not die because of narcissism, but rather indulging in the environment of the reflection without being able to stop himself.

This is an example that McLuhan often used in order to make the public better understand the idea that "the medium is an extension of the human being". The technological environment is so powerful that it can affect people's health at a low level and their spirit at a high level. In the age of the mobile Internet, the cell phone can be seen as an extension of the human body. But it also creates a powerful technological environment in which people can't help but be addicted to it. People only enjoy the convenience brought by this technology, but do not realize its harm, and will not consciously reflect on what kind of reshaping it has done to our society.

The Media is The Message is the central argument of McLuhan's media theory.

McLuhan's study of communication goes against the tradition of American communication studies, which emphasizes content over the medium and distinguishes and separates the medium from the content (the message). According to McLuhan, it is the medium itself that is important, it is the emergence of a new medium that causes some kind of change in society.

In his book The Medium is the Message, McLuhan uses the terms "tribalization," "detribalization," and "retribalization" to describe the transformation of human society from an early oral tradition to a new one. As a metaphor for the development of human society from the early days of oral communication, the age of print media, to the age of electronic media. This change in humanity was brought about by the medium itself not its content; therefore, the medium itself produces the message; the medium is the message.

According to McLuhan, the most essential thing in communication is the medium of communication itself. He argued that it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human interaction and behavior, and the formation of society depends to a greater extent on the nature of the media through which people communicate with each other than on the content of the communication. The media are the basic driving force of social development, and each new medium creates new ways of perceiving and understanding the world and new types of social behavior.

For example, newspapers and television are both media, both carriers of information. However, after the birth of the television medium, the traditional newspaper medium has been affected by the way people transmit and receive information, the way they think about problems and even their way of life have changed, all of which are brought about by the change of media.

The impact of the medium is huge and revolutionary relative to the information it carries. The same is true of today's Internet technology. It is no longer what or how much information is on the Internet that concerns us; it is the technology that matters.