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Hello, my name is Dr. bird (she/they/Dr.), and this is a Dr. bird's eye view, a podcast where I talk about critical media ecology, a framework I debuted in my dissertation project called "From the Boardroom to the Bedroom: Sexual Ecologies in the Algorithmic Age". To simplify what I mean by critical media ecology, you're gonna wanna peek back at the very first episode where I talked about how do we learn.
But today what I'm gonna be talking about is one of the key aspects of my framework, which is humans as media. So what do I mean when I say humans are media? Well, in the project I extended Mir's work from 2014 where they argued that humans, politically and institutionally, are cited and they cite other humans (citational politics).
And whatever those humans have done, who they are, what they say ends up informing exactly the way that we end up seeing the world because, of course, those authorities (canon) end up influencing everything that we come to know.
So in my work Critical media ecology, I extended that, and contextualized it in Dr. Sarah Sharma's work on society being machine-like to argue that critically and culturally, but also politically and in all ways, holistically, humans have always acted as media in a society building process. This might sound very obvious. But to expound on this idea, what I'm doing in this podcast in many different iterations (about eight I've decided) is going over what I'm calling the Triple A of the COVID era in envirusment.
So I'm gonna go into some artistic examples, some activist examples, and some academic examples (of humans as media).
The reason why I'm doing this is because from a critical media ecological standpoint, what I'm always trying to argue and remind people of, especially in this era of anti-intellectualism and an ongoing, sickening, disabling, and deadly context, is that we only know what we know. Everything becomes normal in repetition and everything is connected.
A key aspect of this is knowing who has allowed us to create what we know and why do we believe it? So those three phrases detail why. Which is why the very first episode, of course, I went into how do we learn?
So not to belabor this any longer...Academically, when I say humans as media, what I'm getting into is a subversive use of a description of humans as actors and the way that our actions, although seemingly sometimes insignificant, actually make all the difference.
Everything that we do influences everything else in an environment. That's why from a media ecological standpoint, as I went over in the very first episode, media influence everything in an entire environment. That's what media ecologists look at.
They look at, at least in, in all their idiosyncratic ways, they look at the ways that when a technology is introduced into an environment, much like if you had a glass of water and you took a dropper of red food coloring, you dropped it into the glass, it's gonna turn the whole glass red.
We all do that as well. We're in the landscape that's been colored many different things before, especially in a colonially-founded and capitalist-funded society that unfortunately in my work, in my dissertation where I debuted critical media ecology, I argued that we've fallen into a belief that the human body is a machine, okay?
And in a society where we know that most of us in a colonial Enlightenment (white cismale able-bodied land owning = canonical authority [religion, science, politics, tech]) image have not been deemed fully human. Those (narrow, non-Objective, un-universalizable) ideas of humans as media have influenced our entire environment(s).
Mind you, none of this is novel and everything I'm saying has been ((LOL words)), it's been all, it's all been said before, but I'm connecting the dots in a way that reminds us of our interconnectedness in a time where those dehumanizations have never been, arguably, more revealed to us.
We've never been so connected. We've never had the ability to acknowledge the ways we've been disinformed and miseducated quite like we do now. And so we have a responsibility, as people all a part of the same species, hurdling towards (as climate scientists have extensively documented) an inhabitable planet, that both colonialism and capitalism created, founded, and funded.
We have a responsibility to make sure that those ideologies, that disconnect us from recognizing our own humanness in different ways, through things like ableism and racism and sexism and classism -- among many others -- that we make sure we do everything we possibly can to eradicate those dehumanizations.
And, arguably, if the entire foundation of how everything has been built is rooted with those discriminations built in as features, we cannot move forward to do that in a way that would rehumanize all of us for the very first time since the nation's origin, unless we scrapped the foundation that ensured those dehumanizations were put into practice because those humans who didn't realize they were biased, who probably in certain senses (although legally justifying the dehumanization of the bulk of us), might have had "good intentions".
They might have had, you know, all of the believably "enlightened perspectives, logics, and practices" that they thought would create a more "civilized" society. But, regardless of what they thought, their impact is clear to us Now.
There's been a lot of work that I've cited in the dissertation, that extensively goes into, primarily the way that I've argued the "mechanization of humans," the [incremental] belief that the human body is a machine (as depicted in all types of literatures from medicine to informatics), that we've grown more dehumanized, incrementally, in a way that didn't seem like a big deal in the tiny moments, but -- over time -- shows that we've grown increasingly dehumanized.
As Max Weber's work on rationality....the prioritization of logic over emotion, the way that that has been pushed to such a far extent -- over hundreds of years -- that it is now to an irrational extent...rationality pushed into irrationality. The person that extended that, that I've cited in my work also is George Ritzer, who wrote about the McDonaldization of society.
So this is to say, that all things have been standardized (like at McDonalds). Things are co-opted all the time by the newest iteration(s) of capitalism, especially (now) neoliberalism, that has pushed both parties in the U.S. increasingly conservative.
That's why (neoliberalism) is not called liberalism, it's called neoliberalism. This (neoliberalism) is a philosophical and economic model that was put in place in the mid seventies, but really took off in the eighties and what it is, is it deliberately runs the government like a business. Okay?
So again, incrementally, it (neoliberalism) didn't seem like it was a big deal. However, when it was put into place, what it allowed policy makers (both Republicans and Democrats) to do that believed (or at least acted thereafter like) the government should be run like a business is to corporatize, to deregulate, and to privatize.
So you see this policy(-making) affecting, since the seventies, especially media ownership. And based off of what we've already discussed, if humans act as media in a society building process, and those humans have been taught that logic, rash rationality, individualism, optimization, efficiency are more important than human lives -- that's how you get a context like the current envrusment.
That's why arguably, artistically, activist-wise, this has all been discussed before because technologies don't reveal anything that hasn't already existed. All forms of activism, shifting into the the second tenant of the Triple A of the COVID-19 era...Activists of all types have already discussed this forever.
Long before I got here (laughs) way before . They've been talking about this for forever. As long as we've seen recorded history (that wasn't deliberately destroyed by inequity-informed power-hungry bastards), we've seen the discussions of activists and artists both discussing the need to recognize our relativity, discussing the need to recognize that we deserve better, that our lived experiences are a form of knowledge standpoint, theory, all types of black scholarship, Afro-pessimism, anything that has ever critiqued, critically and culturally, what has come before and what has been believed to have happened -- justly or unjustly -- that speaks to humans as media.
There's a new book that just came out from some of my beloved colleagues, I guess colleagues...it still feels silly (read: very cool and an honor) to even say that cause I'm still so new outta the PhD and Dr. Sharma in particular is so incredibly just profound.
(ANYWAY) Her book Re-Understanding Media Feminist: Extensions of Marshall McCluhan just came out earlier this year, a few months after my dissertation. And in that book, the very first chapter is by Armond Towns, and he talks about the way that especially Black folks, that were deliberately stolen from other nations, brought here as objects on (colonizer) ships.
That is another perfect example of, I think, activist scholarship, but also the way that the, the activists that allowed Armond Towns to basically cite the work that they did (read: archived, histographically preserved) in that chapter, as well as the number of other activists at the end of the edited collection (ReUnderstanding Media) were describing ways of seeing the world through an activist and justice and liberation oriented (not a [neoliberal]) bullshit one , genuinely liberatory and regenerative perspective(s) that a combination of media ecology and critical cultural insights births.
And then, lastly, artistically, I mean, there's no shortage of the ways that art has been used to detail the ways that technology has revealed to us, things that are broken (Google also: media ecological work on breakdowns as breakthroughs).
And I have an article coming out that I just finished some copy edits for just a couple days ago. This article was accepted, actually, earlier this year in the Art/Research International Journal. But I had some copy edits to do because it's a very tense and realistically traumatic work.
(In it) I use (the method of) poetic inquiry in it, so I have a number of poems that I wrote between 2016 and 2021, as well as personal narratives and academic work (much like I'm doing with this podcast) that blends and blurs the -- ultimately -- arbitrary distinctions between private and public life, but specifically the topic that I detail (because unfortunately because humans have acted as media and those humans built deliberately inequitable structures that they believed were machine-like -- fueled by humans as machines) created by what I've called the sexually violent US ecology.
And especially as someone who has not realized (in a real way, that) I am a late (LOL WOOORDDS will not word) in life realized autistic person, (considering) recent research that says nine out of every 10 autistic, femme folks have likely experienced sexual violence, that really just sends the entire message through which the ways art can add what I've described as the fleshy body politic of an otherwise dehumanizing and violence structure.
I know I've covered a lot. . But I hope that these (Triple A) examples (and especially if you listen to either my reading of Requirement Politics, the piece I just detailed, or you take a look at my dissertation, which I've also read entirely on the All Audio App Clubhouse, hopefully) in this episode -- this first real episode of the Dr. bird's eye view podcast can clear up what I mean a little bit more, when I say "humans act as media" (in a subversive sense) to try to bring attention to the ways that we've accepted our own dehumanization(s) in a society where that is the norm. We all deserve better.
Until next time, take care of yourselves (faded crow sounds)