Whose Truth Are We Talking About Here?

Media Ecologist Kathryn Fry on How our Tools Shape our Reality

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?”