Mediacology

I’m currently writing a chapter on Native America, education and digital learning for the MacArthur Foundation, who is publishing a seminal six book series on the subject next year. My chapter will be in the “Race and Ethnicity” volume. MacArthur is investing a lot of resources ($50 million!) into this project and is making a conscious effort to create a new field of study on the subject.

Part of their effort to draw attention to the project is their “Spotlight” blog, which highlights some of the ideas and insights of the authors. I posted to it today, and you can view it here. A short snip:

The Nunga (southern Australian aborigines) have a term for the mental software of the European colonizers: “Invader Dreaming.” I take this to be a compact description of a mentality, one that is of the “invaders,” but one that also “invades.”

And just as I view advertising as the dream life of corporations, I think its fair to say that digital media is a kind of dream world that requires critical inspection. Consequently, I’m interested in what sociologists refer to as “subjectivities,” ways of perceiving and being in the world and how they impact communities. As an educator and writer engaging different media forms in Native American classrooms, I want to extend this discussion to a broader understanding of communication systems as mental and spiritual environments, or as ”media ecologies.” As Neil Postman remarks, “When media make war against each other, it is a case of worldviews in collision.”

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