The Chicago School and Ecology

Abstract

The Chicago School’s use of ecological metaphors has much to offer scholars interested in the complexities of the contemporary media environment. This article considers how the use of ecological metaphors enabled the Chicago School to build an empirical approach to the study of human forms of organization and traces how the use of ecological metaphors has evolved in subsequent scholarship on media and communication. It examines the interest of media ecology scholars in the environment created by technologies, and discusses how proponents of actor network theory have expanded the view of networked actors to encompass technologies, objects, and human agents. The article subsequently traces a more recent proliferation of ecological metaphors as a way of understanding globalized and networked media practices. This approach, in turn, enables the reconfiguration of questions around the relationship between media, democracy, and citizenship. This article suggests that the use of ecological approaches enables scholars to pay attention to the complexities of networked interactions in communities that are geographically bounded but globally connected. This, in turn, points the continued importance of grounded, nitty-gritty empirical work tracing the variety of communicative practices within particular communities, and the ways in which these practices are shaped by relationships between a variety of actors within and beyond these communities.

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