Media Ecology and the Systems View

Systems concepts and the systems view have been anticipated, arrived at independently, or otherwise incorporated in the work of media ecology scholars. The distinction between a category and its members in the theory of logical types, of different levels of abstracting in general semantics, and of metacommunication and communication in relational psychology, are the equivalent of the distinction between the system as a whole and its parts, and of the medium and its content. The concept of medium in media ecology is also related to the concept of the boundary in systems theory. Further, systems theory aids in our understanding of how writing and print media resulted in increasingly more complex societies. Media ecology differs from the systems approach, however, in being concerned with qualitative distinctions between media, as opposed to only attending to the quantitative differences regarding volume of information transmitted.