Running head: NEW MEDIA NEW TECHNOLOGY 1
New Media New Technology
Fangzhao Peng
Arizona State University
New Media New Technology
Turkey shot down Russian’s plane on November 24th, 2015. Relation between Russia
and Turkey is increasingly tense. The headline of Russia Today’s news report was “Russian Su-
24 fighter jet shot down over Syria” (RT, 2015). The headline of CNN’s news report was
“Turkey shoots down Russian warplane near border with Syria” (Akyavas & Bruton, 2015).
Everyone could easily saw the difference between Russia Today and CNN’s report. In this case,
the national identity of a media affects what they said. Media Ecology Theory is about the
medium. The theory also predicts that the communication technology pushes forward human
civilization. It provides a new perspective for people to understand media and a new way for
scholars to research beyond contents. This paper will include theoretical discussion, synthesis of
scholarship and suggestions for future research, and mainly talk about the connection between
technology and different types of media.
Theoretical Discussion
NEW MEDIA NEW TECHNOLOGY 2
Media Ecology Theory is a study of the media environments. The technology, the form of
information presented to us and “codes of communication” enhance and improve the level of
human civilization (Media Ecology Association, n.d.). According to Moody-Ramirez, Lewis and
Murray (2015), media ecology theory emphasizes on “how communication technologies
transform the political, social and cultural configuration of society”. When McLuhan said, “the
medium is the message”, he wanted us to know that media without content reshapes human
experience and affects our world “more than the sum total of the messages they contain”
(Griffin, Ledbetter & Sparks, 2015). Then, McLuhan explained the medium is the message based
on historical development law of human civilization. To support his point of view, McLuhan
divided the human history into four stages, which are “tribal age, literate age, print age and
electronic age” (Griffin, Ledbetter & Sparks, 2015). The reason our world continues to advance
is because our communication technology keeps improving. The key communication
technologies in human history were “the phonetic alphabet, the printing press, and the telegraph”
(Griffin, Ledbetter & Sparks, 2015). For example, according to Griffin, Ledbetter and Sparks
(2015), “The most important aspect of movable type was its ability to reproduce the same text
over and over again, and a press run of 100,000 copies of Understand Media suggests he was
right”. These technology inventions also made the world more tightly connected. Electronic
media are retribalizing the human race and making the world become an electronic global village
