Media: Digital, Ecological and Epistemological

Media today, particularly digital media, have both ecological and epistemological ramifications. New digital media like blogs, wikis, Facebook and smart phones combine several ‘conventional’ mediatic forms – like print, audio and video – to produce results, as we all know, that are much more than the sum of their parts. The power and ubiquity of these media and their combination form the grounds for their ecological and epistemological significance. ‘Ecological’ in this context refers to the cultural and informational ecology or environment, in terms of the way that these are constituted through media. Epistemologically speaking, media shape both what we know and how we come to know it. ‘Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live,’ as Niklas Luhmann observed, ‘we know through ... media’ (Luhmann, 2000, p. 1). In this short introduction, I first introduce ways of understanding the ecological and epistemological relevance of media. I then explore the ramifications of these understandings specifically for digital media, education and media education. I conclude by briefly summarizing the contributions to this special issue, showing how they illustrate different aspects of the ecological and epistemological significance of media.