Media Ecologists believe that there's no such thing as a value-neutral medium. TV, the Internet, and even cell phones each have various propensities and biases because of the way they work. The same must be true for money - particularly the kind of money we use here in the United States, which is created by fiat and costs interest to borrow. (There are many examples of currencies throughout history that have worked in other ways, with often better results.)If true media literacy is the ability not only to read and interpret but to author in that medium, then we should engage in the creation of alternative, complementary currencies. Money needn't only be understood as an economy - it could also be understood as an ecology.
The idea of money as a medium or ecology is interesting in its own right, but it also suggests that we consider nearly any sort of information as having the potential to become a medium. Given that any complex system of information can possess the same sorts of qualities that "traditional" media, we can easily extend the concept to, for example, transportation systems, architecture, or classrooms.
This might, at face value, seem sort of pointless: can a transportation system (say, consisting of roads and vehicles) really be a medium? And if so, what's the point? Simple: The concept of medium gives us a different handle on how people work within that system. So rather than simply thinking of transportation systems in terms of throughput (number of vehicle miles travelled per minute, for example), we can also think of a transportation system as a medium in which participants communicate with each other, interacting in complex ways (turn signals, horns, lane changes, accelerations and decelerations, etc.). Traffic problems become rhetorical/communicative issues rather than simple matters of efficiency. This approach is not necessarily better or worse than traditional approaches, but it can help us approach issues in ways not normally possible.
[via rushkoff.blog]
Posted by johndan at June 22, 2004 01:26 PM
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