Media ecology and the future ecosystemic society
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REVIEW ARTICLE
Media ecology and the future ecosystemic society Juho Ruotsalainen 1 & Sirkka Heinonen 1
Received: 2 April 2015 / Accepted: 23 July 2015 # The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract This article discusses a possible future, in which the network society is deepening to become an internet-based ecosystemic society. The study of the possible societal impacts of the ‘media disruption’ brought along by the internet has been somewhat neglected. The article thus examines the social consequences of the ‘media disruption’ from the perspective of the media ecology tradition, which takes media into account as ‘living environments’. The article connects the media ecology tradition to the concept of the ecosystem, which has been primarily used in business economics discussions. In an ecosystemic economy, companies work in closer collaboration and share information more freely. One of the most central themes of the media ecology tradition is how different areas of society, such as private and public, work and leisure time and various institutions and organisations, begin to interlock as a consequence of the spread of electronic and digital media. The main argument of the article is that as the internet further penetrates all spheres of society, the metaphor of the ecosystem could serve as a metaphor for the entire society, not only for the economy. In this way it anticipates a possible future for the whole of society through changes in media. The article is part of the MEDEIA project (New roles and functions of media in the digital meanings society 2030) conducted at the Finland Futures Research Centre (FFRC), University of Turku. Keywords Media . Journalism . Media ecology . Ecosystems . Economy . Digital age . Transformational futures * Juho Ruotsalainen [email protected] Sirkka Heinonen [email protected] 1
Finland Futures Research Centre (FFRC), University of Turku, Turku, Finland
Introduction The changes in media and journalism that the internet has brought about are often discussed in terms of new business models and technologies. According to Steensen [64], research on online journalism has been dominated by a discourse of technological innovation. Lewis and Westlund [39] claim that during the past two decades, journalism studies have concentrated on the role of technology in news work. Additionally, the emphasis has been on the editorial side of news organisations, and broader, socio-technical considerations have been ignored [39]. The topic of social consequences of media has especially been neglected in futures research. Major futures research journals such as Futures, Foresight, European Journal of Futures Research, and Technological Forecasting & Social Change do not return any results on the topic from the past 5 years with the search terms ‘media’ or ‘journalism’. New media culture and the social consequences of the “media revolution” have indeed received surprisingly little attention, considering the central role media and journalism a
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