An Ecological View of the Internet

   Viewing the Internet as an ecological system is one way to think about its possible Utopian or dystopian future and how this could influence individuals, communities, societies, and culture. Because the Internet is still evolving, both academics and media critics have argued the need for critical examination. Based on his business experience, Davenport (1997) believes we need to understand the ecology of information. Information ecology examines how people create, distribute, understand, and use information. Currently, individuals live in an environment in which they encounter external, organizational, and personal information. Examining how people use information is one ecological approach to better understanding the Internet. A different ecological approach is to examine the Internet as a media environment. McLuhan was the first person to conceptualize media (books, radio, and television) as environments. The study of media environments examines a medium's structure, content, and impact on people. Media environments are complex message systems that can influence humans to engage in certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving because media can structure what we see and say. For instance, the textual nature of e-mail does not include visual and aural information. Consequently, the way people communicate through e-mail is different from the way they do in face-to-communication. In e-mail, people must focus on words rather than people. To compensate for the lack of visual and verbal information, emoticons were developed and oral characteristics were incorporated into writing styles. But people still behave differently in computer-mediated environments than they do in face-to-face ones. Frequently, messages are rude or they express extreme opinions, and e-mail messages are written in a different way than a traditional letters-they are often in formal and conversational.

   McLuhan's ideas about media environments were later expanded by Postman (1979) into the concept of media ecology. According to Postman (1970), "Media ecology tries to find out what roles media force us to play, how media structure what we are seeing, why media make us feel and act as we do". Every society has its own patterns of communication and information systems, and this media environment can influence social attitudes and concepts of knowledge. For instance, the introduction of computers influenced our attitudes about technology and its role in society and education: today, people often seek technological solutions to social problems and many schools have integrated computer skills into their curricula.