Projects

PAST PROJECTS:

#Internetwork-Ecology
My longest research project (PhD part-time, 2001 – 2015) analysed the internet as a complex ecosystem that emerges from the total sum of computational devices, internetworking infrastructure, and symbolic human activities.  The study is informed by a qualitative meta-analysis of scientific ecology and media ecology, social network studies, and software studies.  The study proposes several conceptual developments that enhance and extend media ecology, creating a bridge that integrates media studies with both information technology and scientific ecology.

At the most literal level the internet is a network of networks. The underlying hardware and software that makes the internet possible is abstracted as a layered model in the TCP/IP and OSI models.  The software layer exists along with the physical computational hardware in a technical sense. The software layer also “defines” the affordances of what are typically called computational media. When we recognise the affordances defined by software we can classify these devices as #software-defined-media.  Above the software is another abstracted layer representing a combination of the multiplex social networks of sociology and the symbolic life-worlds of #Media-Ecology. The final layer includes everything that modern society knows as “The Internet” or “online life”.

An interesting parallel comes from the field of #media-ecology which is focused on the complex system of society and media, frequently treating the term media ecology as a metaphor. An important observation is that media ecology is NOT simply metaphorical. In the field of scientific ecology the units of measurement they use also have many levels of abstraction;  “population”, “community”, “ecosystem”, “biome”, and so on.

Beginning in many humanities disciplines in the early-2000s was a growing trend to represent any complex system as “an ecology” (following F. Guattari, G. Bateson, et al) which is inaccurate because ecology is not a unit of measurement. Ecology is the name of a scientific discipline.  In scientific ecology there is a unit of measurement for complex systems that is well-known even to the general public:  the Ecosystem.  Using the term “an ecosystem” instead of “an ecology” is more accurate in most cases, and doing so is compatible with scientific ecology.  #There-Are-No-Ecologies

The sum total of the layers of media abstraction gives rise to the main unit of measurement of #Internetwork-Ecology: the #Software-Defined-Media ecosystem.