Medium: Ecological & Critical

As I embark upon making sense of the act of blogging, this very Blog itself is a basis for ruminations and self-reflexivity. It seems strange to ask the question what is a Blog? Hitherto I have taken it for granted and regale in the ability to put my views into the open and to share it with the class. What I can see through my eyes, the product of my thoughts and I sitting here hammering away at the computer key pad. Rather a mysterious affair to dwell upon. I had had not thought of making meaning of Blog as a Medium before and only vaguely had sensed its potential.In order to understand it there must be some gravitas and legitimation, sociological and epistemological as it pertains to Information Science and Literacy.
The Blog is contained in a nebulous territory, both in its intrinsic structure in its outward manifestation. As I can produce and view myself the surface, there is a vast sub structure laying covertly in the sub caverns of the Internet and the Web. Hence the Blog is only one of the various media which are available for one's use and expression.I begin with Postman's postulate that the medium is a metaphor which moulds thought which intertwines questions of information, education and epistemology. So is McLuhan's idea about the dynamic reciprocity between creation of machines in a society creates which demands reconfiguration of perspectives and thoughts. These media ecological views are a starting point for my own thinking pertaining to the Blog as a Medium.However, Postman's cultural critique is deterministic demonstrated by his analysis of the 'Age of Explosion' based on the 'sovereignty of the printing press' as well as the Telegraph enabling a possibility of a 'unified American discourse' but becomes irrelevant as source of information, because society is divorced from its very social and intellectual context.
Boyd's ‘Blog as a Medium’, has critical and media ecological perspective. She demonstrates the problem of defining a Blog to understand Medium meaningfully. Conceptions of the Medium are irreconcilable than how social Bloggers themselves view the blogging phenomenon. She concludes that a Medium such as a Blog "is not a self-descriptive term".Various definitions reflect predominant corporate and marketing interests, as a computer mediated genre of Information Communication, which can be "evaluated in content and structure"; the linear Social and Information Science researcher's description of the blog which "frame" their research objectives; or the several mass media definitions.These conceptual, semantic or analytical definitions obscure what the Medium and do not show a critical depth. Thus the "intent" of the individuals who "practice and act" is undermined. It is this phenomenological ground of the social practitioner which provides the critical framework for the understanding of the Medium. The Blog is at once a Medium, a creative and individual product of the blogger.
In McLuhan’s term, the Medium as a Blog is an "extension of man". Not the technologies but the social constructivist and creative moments define the Medium in which all textual and oral, corporeal and spatial, and public and private borders are eliminated.The sociologist Fuller also views how important media ecologies are in understanding media dynamics although the term is 'susceptible to interpretation'.Fuller argues the problem of studying Medium as an isolated feature and suggests that the complex manifestations of media through their forms and organizations should be looked at. Aesthetics and politics as key dimensions underpinning the study towards exploring the relationships between form and practice of media thus it is a critical exercise. In this way, the materiality of the media processes can be explored via the relationship between the production of culture (media artefacts) their integration into cultural life and subsequently as knowledge through hermeneutics and discourse. Fuller’s theory includes critique and power to understand media and particular Blogs.Fuller challenges the linear-discursive standardisation method applied to make an object meaningful to a subject. Although standardisation may manifest meaning of an object, culturally and aesthetically it redresses its potential and scope. Thus to frame a Medium in a uniform way will curtail its understanding. Medium such as a pirate radio station, photographs, Cctv web images demonstrate the powerful interplay of politics, ethics and aesthetics domains in media ecology. Fuller argues that media ecological perspectives, help to understand the complex layers of technologies, software designs, legal framework through their "dynamic mulitiplicity" demonstrated through patterns of action of society.An individual seeks to find her own self through the media, will resist the overarching layers of technology owned by corporations and their institutional and ideological modus operandi. The autonomous subject seeks empowerment by resisting those very technologies and media she is using within the framework of media ecology in order to subvert and become a creative subject through any Medium.In summing up, my own understanding of the Medium Blog was enhanced when examined through interdisciplinary glasses such a literary theories (structuralist and post structuralist), media ecological, cultural theory and sociology in order to appreciate its radical potential in education and literacy. Hence I take a Blog to be a media ecological and critical Medium. In terms of the Medium's application as a pedagogical tool, it appears to hold great potential for educators who employ technology to enhance learning. By affirming the student as a subject and allowing the development of the literary creative processes, it would permit the phenomenological and critical approaches which Boyd and Fuller both underline above.