NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication (MCC) celebrates 50 years since the founding of a radical new approach to the study of media.
From Communications to a Focus on Media Environments
The department dates back to the era of World War II, when it was chaired by Charles Siepmann who had worked in radio programming at the BBC and in media policy for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
“At the time it was the Department of Communications in Education, and it was one of the first of its kind in academia,” says Ted Magder, associate professor in MCC and former chair of the department from 2003 to 2009.
“The department’s approach was largely pragmatic rather than theoretical back then,” explains Professor Emeritus Terence Moran, who helped create and direct the Media Ecology program. “I was an undergraduate in the English department, but I was enamored with the Communications in Education courses taught by Siepmann and others, and I took a number of them that related to language.”
When Siepmann left NYU in 1968, the department fragmented, with many programs sent to other schools. Neil Postman, a professor in the department, was asked to help graduate the leftover PhD and master’s students. Moran was now on faculty, and he helped Postman with this task, along with moving the department in a new direction.
“We created an English education program that was a combination of linguistics, semantics, and communications, in part by reviving a number of Siepmann courses I had taken in the past,” remembers Moran. “After a couple of years, we realized that this new program wasn’t doing what we wanted, so we reconceptualized it into Media Ecology in 1971.”
Postman and Moran envisioned Media Ecology as a way of teaching communications differently — a departure from a practice largely focused on techniques and technologies, such as how to use film in projectors. Their interests had shifted to thinking about media as an environment in which cultures grow. Postman was influenced by Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, who he knew from his graduate work at Columbia.
In a keynote address delivered to the Speech Communication Association in 1973, Postman described this newly established Media Ecology program as an “exhilarating effort we are making at NYU to elaborate a new perspective for studying communication.”
“In effect, what we’re trying to do is work within a new structure for understanding the communication process,” explained Postman. “Once an atomistic view of communication is rejected and in its place is substituted an ecological view, you have an entirely new set of problems for which there are no readily available conceptual handles. What you need, when you come right down to it, is a new paradigm.”
One of the first PhD students was Christine Nystrom, who defended her influential thesis Toward a Science of Media Ecology in 1973 and subsequently helped shape the NYU program as a professor in the department.
Moran summed up their intent at the time:
We began with three basic assumptions: first, that all media are not mere techniques and technologies for transmitting information but rather active environments in which peoples and cultures live; second, that we could best understand the ecology of all media environments through interdisciplinary multidisciplinary transdisciplinary approaches and, third, that professors and students were active learning partners in the new undertaking we called Media Ecology – a name chosen to free us from the theoretical tyrannies of traditional communication programs and to provide us with the greatest latitude to redefine our fields of inquiry as we expanded our focus to include all human and human-created forms of communication in our explorations into the unknown frontiers of media studies. (Explorations in Media Ecology, Volume 16, Numbers 2-3, 1 September 2017, pp. 205-212(8))
Reflecting back on this venture in a 2000 keynote address to the Media Ecology Association, Postman said: “We put the word ‘media’ in the front of the word ‘ecology’ to suggest that we were not simply interested in media, but in the ways in which the interaction between media and human beings give a culture its character.”
“The connection between Neil and NYU’s School of Education was the focus on how media affects education and literacy, especially in children,” says Susan Murray, professor and current chair of the department, who was hired by Postman when she began at NYU. “Neil, however, opened up the meaning of media to move beyond individual mediums like television or radio and look at it as a holistic, ecological science.”
“We have long been committed to the idea that the study of media and communications shouldn’t privilege a particular medium” says Magder. “That kind of agnosticism around the platform meant we were—and remain—very open to new trends.”
Global Media for the 21st Century
Neil Postman is remembered by many as an inspired visionary of the department’s (and field’s) potential, centering it around a broad definition of media that allowed it to flourish and adapt over time. In public discourse there is a renewed interest in the communication theories of these early media ecologists and in Postman’s prescient warnings about the collapsing boundaries between entertainment and politics.
After Postman passed away in 2003, the department refocused its scholarly direction — a recognition that the department was growing and embodied an even larger variety of methods and approaches to studying media.
“In the era that followed Neil’s passing, we wanted to both honor his legacy but also reinvent media studies,” says Marita Sturken, professor of MCC. “Because the department had historically framed itself around media instead of communications, we had a lot of flexibility to embrace technological change in culture, society, and industry—including the rise of digital media and its importance in virtually every field—and be forward thinking.”
In 2008, the department was renamed Media, Culture, and Communication. While the Media Ecology program itself no longer exists, its multifaceted approach to the study of media persists in the department today.
“Our key areas of study are wide-reaching, and our scholarship in areas like media history and global media are some of the strongest, most cutting-edge out there today,” says Sturken, who chaired the department from 2009 to 2013. “We regularly revamp our curriculum to reflect contemporary interests, so we have experts in fresh areas like visual culture, the history of video games, queer media, digital technology, and more.”
“We are capacious in terms of scholarship,” echoes Magder. “Our faculty have tons of different degrees and scholarly backgrounds, which means that we have antennae everywhere and our interest is expansive—just like that of our students.”
“The through line between then and now is that today’s MCC department also sees media as broadly defined and omnipresent,” says Murray. “Media is a part of our infrastructure and our systems, and we look at how we structure our experiences, interactions, and values in relation to it — not separately.”
From the start, Media Ecology had trained students to examine media in a global context, offering summer courses in Ireland, Germany, Egypt, and Prague. Now departmental expertise extends across the globe, including the Middle East, East Asia, the Global South, Africa, and Europe. MCC sends more majors abroad than all other Steinhardt departments. Students have ample opportunities for global study through avenues like the Global Media Scholars (GMS) program which immerses undergraduate students in the study of media through NYU’s campuses in Paris, Prague, Buenos Aires, and Shanghai.
Professor Deborah Borisoff, who served as interim Chair from 2002-2003, considers the department’s evolution to be a natural one. “The spirit of Neil is very much alive at MCC today. Media Ecology was never one-dimensional; its engagement with language, communication, cultures, and technologies continued to expand and branch out under Neil.” Borisoff joined the department full-time in 1986 to grow and further develop the MA program as well as undergraduate offerings, and direct the Speech and Interpersonal Communication (later Communication and Social Interaction) program.
“Today, MCC is a large and expansive media studies department with an emphasis on the deep relationship communications has with all other facets of the world, from anthropology to politics to technology,” says Charlton McIlwain, professor of MCC and vice provost for faculty engagement and development. “We are all proud of the growth we have accomplished together.”