Mediacology: A Multicultural Approach to Media Literacy in the Twenty-first Century

by Antonio Lopez

Traditional media literacy models are mostly left-brained, inherited from the legacy of alphabetic literacy, the Gutenberg press revolution, and industrial mass media production. New digital media radically alter the their nonlinear, multisensory, field-like properties are more right-brain oriented. Consequently, rather than focus exclusively on deconstructing the products of design objects (such as an advertisement «text»), digital learning should respond to the design of the system itself, including cultural and cognitive bias.
Mediacology proposes a design-for-pattern approach called «media permaculture», which restructures media literacy to be in sync with new media practices connected with sustainability and the perceptual functions of the right brain hemisphere. In the same way that permaculture approaches gardening by establishing the natural parameters of its ecological niche, media permaculture explores the individual’s «mediacological niche» in the context of knowledge communities. By applying bioregional thinking to the symbolic order, media permaculture redresses the standard one-size-fits-all literacy model by taking into account diverse cognitive strategies and emerging convergence media practices. Antonio López applies a practical knowledge of alternative media, cross-cultural communication, and ecology to build a meaningful theory of media education.

178 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2008

About the author

With a research focus on bridging ecology with media literacy, Antonio Lopez, Ph.D, is an expert curriculum designer, educator, trainer, theorist, and researcher. He is the founding theorists and architects of ecomedia literacy. As an author he has written numerous academic articles, essays and four books: Ecomedia Literacy: Integrating Ecology into Media Education; Greening Media Education: Bridging Media Literacy with Green Cultural Citizenship; The Media Ecosystem: What Ecology Can Teach Us About Responsible Media Practice; and Mediacology: A Multicultural Approach to Media Literacy in the 21st Century. Currently he is Chair and Associate Professor of Communications and Media Studies at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. Resources and writing are available at: https://antonio-lopez.com/

Reviews

[Jen · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was terrible. Absolutely terrible. You know that person you know, that has a huge chip on their shoulder and overcompensates in the area where they are deficient? And their overcompensation is really douchey and they are clearly just trying to impress some PhD somewhere by inventing terms like "HoloGrok" and "mediasphere?" Oh wait, it's just me? I wish I could have tossed this to the "can't finish" pile after page #1. I suffered through it since I had signed up to submit a review to Green Teacher magazine. Thank you Goodreads friends, for giving me a place to share my true thoughts on this book. Here is my edited and not so mean review that I just submitted to GT:

Antonio Lopez coins the word “Mediacology” among many other inventive terms in this book to describe and advocate for what he feels is a necessary shift in the way educators help their students understand, navigate and respond to new and traditional media in the 21st century. Lopez’s principal recommendation is to not only deconstruct media in the classroom, but to also allow students the opportunity to reconstruct and recreate their own media contributions, empowering students to actively engage in media rather than demonizing it as a corporate invention. Through exhaustively copious literature review and imaginative allegories, Lopez explores media comprehension through traditional Native American cultural beliefs, parallels to the ecological “systems thinking” approach, and even an in-depth analysis of the popular television show LOST. This is a very dense volume, and many readers may find the language and academic writing style a bit hard to digest. The core ideas in the book are expressed most clearly and accessibly in the later chapters, so if readers can persevere through the end, they will be rewarded with challenging perspectives on creatively rethinking media education methods through the prism of sustainability and permaculture.