In 1964, Marshall McLuhan proposes the idea that sometimes the news or information we seek to find is actually not what we are mainly drawn to. We are closely affected by the actual medium we use to reach this information. Individuals are very sensitive to their environment whether it’s emotionally or physically. The way we understand or perceive things is strictly based on the medium that withhold the news. These mediums and overall environments that influence the way we perceive information we see is media ecology. Through time, we are constantly altering the world we live in, which also means our environments. McLuhan was very influenced by the theory of perceptions that he had encountered while studying at Trinity Hall, in Cambridge. Our media ecology is constantly evolving through different forms such as orally, on paper, radio, podcast, TV and internet. These mediums were also categories in different time periods such as tribal age (all body senses were used to interpret information), age of literacy (interpretation mainly focused on sight), print age (the abandon of sharing ideas as a community), electronic age (sound and touch are central to the understanding of information) and digital age (still in development). Each one of these domaines has a different impact on the individual withdrawing the information. As years go by, the viewer is actually getting further away from the sources of information that are often altered and changed. Neil Postman, who developed the theory of media ecology, warned the viewer that the distance that separates us from the news could be an easy bypass for disruptive activity. This could often be explained as pushing one side of the story more than the other to hide something from a population (propaganda, etc). In 2018, we could easily say that all our search history is filtered, sold to companies that we might identify with and then who finally bombarde our pages with information they think we need to see for their own interest (product advertisements, etc).
Works Cited:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan
Communication Theory Sab 