Dictionary

mediology en · NOUN

Etymology

Borrowed from French médiologie.

Meanings

1. (countable, uncountable) An interdisciplinary approach to the study of culture, created by Régis Debray in 1979, that pays specific attention to human symbolic activity and to technology, especially as a medium of cultural transmission.
   • What mediology wishes to bring to light is the way in which something serves as a medium, and the often unperceived complexities that go with it, looking back over the long term (from the birth of writing) without being overly concerned with present-day media (even if certain mediologists are prepared to consider these). 2007, Lawrence D. Kritzman, Brian J. Reilly, M. B. DeBevoise, The Columbia History of Twentieth-century French Thought, →ISBN, page 289:
   • Mediology is interdisciplinary by nature and, therefore, unstable and constantly defining new avenues of inquiry that reveal the mechanisms of history itself. 2013, Christopher John Murray, Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought, →ISBN, page 158:
   • Against the background of the radically constructivist mediologies of Vilem Flusser and Niklas Luhmann, Berressem argues that Deleuze's radical philosophy allows for a fundamental realignment of the ecological notions of the environment and the medium. 2009, Bernd Herzogenrath, Deleuze/Guattari & ecology, →ISBN, page 11:
   • It would be, were it not for the powers attributed to mediology, which Debray defines as a battle against a marked Western tendency, 'la coupure de l'esthétique' [the split between aesthetics and technology] (ibid.: 163). 2013, Nigel Saint, Andy Stafford, Modern French Visual Theory: A Critical Reader, page 151:
2. (countable, uncountable) The study of mass media and its influence.
   • There was no media research in the strict sense during this period. Mediology did not yet exist. 2006, Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, Thomas Tufte, Communication for Social Change Anthology, →ISBN:
   • I do not believe any mass mediology can predict the effect of a mass media message. 1978, Altro Polo, →ISBN, page 114:
   • Throughout the chapters that follow, I focus on the centrality and significance of contemporary media theory to understanding nineteenth-century British literary, scientific, and technological production and thus concentrate my attention on Romantic mediologies as opposed to inspecting perhaps more eminent or familiar critical or theoretical paradigms like Romantic book history and print culture, studies of Romantic reading publics, investigations of nineteenth-century periodical culture, or Tomanticism and the digital humanities. 2016, Andrew Burkett, Romantic Mediations: Media Theory and British Romanticism, →ISBN, page 17:
3. (countable, uncountable) The use of mass media.
   • The Hegelian master, for all his violence and terror, still requires literature, names, memory, and readerships—in other words, the public sphere. Such Hegelian mediologies are radically evacuated and removed from all living supports of translation, witnessing, and transmission in the war to end all wars, whose focal attack surfaces are the organic and living substrates of transmissible names, including those that support the nomenclature of war itself. 2015, Allen Feldman, Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory, →ISBN:
   • It is everywhere visible in hard data about four key elements of that culture: film. television, books, and theme parks. But it is not limited to such elements, for they are but pieces of a mesmerizing global mediology that suffuses consciousness everywhere. 2001, Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy, →ISBN, page 84:
   • If, following Nietzsche, the real world has become a fairy tale and there are no facts, only interpretations, then mediology becomes ontology, the media construct reality, in agreement not only with Baudrillard, who regarded the Gulf War as a pure media invention, but also with Karl Rove, who famously believed that imperial power is capable of constructing reality. 2015, Juliet Floyd, James E. Katz, Philosophy of Emerging Media, →ISBN:

Forms

Relateds

mediological · mediologic · mediologist