8. Media as Lived Environments: The ecological Psychology of Educational Technology

Brockenbrough S. Allen
Richard G. Otto

San Diego State University

We are rapidly moving towards an era in which most everyday activity will be shaped by environments that are not only artificial--most humans now live in cities--but also mediated. In developed countries, emotional and cognitive activity in all levels and segments of society is increasingly vested in information-rich venues supported by television, radio, phone, and computer networks. Even in remote areas of the world, peasants watch satellite broadcasts and play battery-operated video games. And in the depths of the Amazon River basin, primitive tribes use small videocams to document territorial encroachments and the destruction of rain forest habitat.

The narrow bandwidth of midcentury media technologies, however, has engendered a paradigm in which people think of media primarily as channels for sending and receiving symbols and messages (see 4.3, 4.4). Derivatives of this notion liken knowledge to content or even to a commodity that can be stored, transmitted, and received. The utility of this channel communications metaphor is being challenged by emerging computer-based media technologies that function less like books, journals, films, and broadcasts and more like workshops, laboratories, offices, and studios. These new venues for working, playing, teaching, and learning allow and often require exploratory action and ambulatory perception and thus are not entirely consistent with models of cognition that treat perception primarily as reception.

Indeed, the ergonomic utility of many contemporary human-computer interfaces is based on metaphors and mechanics that invite users to participate in worlds populated by semiautonomous objects and agents, ranging from buttons and windows to sprites and computer personas. Attempts to model user engagement with these worlds as processing of symbols, messages, and discourse are limited because the channel communications metaphor fails to specify many of the modalities by which humans as organisms understand their surroundings. These modalities include locating, tracking, identifying, grasping, moving, and modifying objects (see 31.2.2.2). There is a profound but not always obvious difference between receiving communication and acquiring information through such modalities.

8.1 OVERVIEW

Our chapter explores the metaphor of media as lived environments. A medium can be considered an environment to the extent that it supports both the perception of opportunities for acting and some means for acting. This ecological perspective can help us understand how media users exercise their powers of perception, mobility, and agency within the constraints imposed by particular media technologies and within the conventions established by various media cultures.

The chapter explores paradigms for linking the work of ecological psychologists with the concerns of researchers, designers, and developers who are responsible for understanding and improving the person-environment fit. It examines ways in which ecological psychology might inform the design of products and systems that are efficient in the sense that they promote wise use of human cognitive resources and humane in the sense that they enable authentic modes of being.

The metaphor of media as environments helps us to reconsider trade-offs between the cost of (a) external storage and processing of information in the form of realia(1) or media and the cost of (b) internal storage and processing of information as Mental-Internal Representations of Situations(2) As a matter of convenience, we will use MIROS throughout this chapter as a general alternative to the superabundance of terms for internal representations, including stimulus-response mechanisms, memories, images, associations, schemata, models, propositions, productions, and neural networks.

As will be argued later in greater detail, many MIROS are quite incomplete, functioning as complements to rather than substitutes for the external representation of situations provided by media and realia. Investment of organic resources in improved perception, whether such perception is acquired through learning or by natural selection, is an important alternative to construction of more complete MIROS, because improved perception allows organisms to use information reflected in the structure of the environment, information maintained at no biological cost to the organism. Environments rich in information related to the needs, goals, or intentions of an organism favor development of enhanced perception. In the long run, environments lacking such information favor development of enhanced MIROS. This trade-off between internal and external storage and processing provides a basis for coordinating media with MIROS so that they can "share the work" of representing situations (see 2.3.3).

The actions afforded by media environments are not always the same as those afforded by imaginary or real environments represented by media. Media technologies can partially overcome dislocations in time through storage of information and dislocations in space through transmission of information. Opportunities for perceiving and acting on media, however, are rarely identical to the opportunities for perceiving and acting on corresponding realia or MIROS.

Controversies that treat media as mere conveyances of symbols and messages often neglect differences in actions enabled, respectively, by media, realia, and MIROS, The pages of a book on human anatomy, for example, afford examination of the structures of the human body, as does a film of an autopsy. Each of these two types of media environments, however, offers radically different possibilities for exploratory action. The anatomy book affords systematic surveys of body structure through layouts and cross sections, while the film affords observation of the mechanics of the dissection process.

The advantages of storage and transmission provided by media technologies have to be weighed against some loss in verity (Thurman & Mattoon, 1994) and functional fidelity. Older technologies such as print and film have well established conventions for helping end users reconstitute missing circumstances and points of view. Prominent among these conventions are the cues and explicit directions that accompany two-dimensional pictures and that serve to guide viewers in constructing the MIROS required for interpretation and understanding. These conventions, which we will examine in a later section of the chapter, help us understand how perception in mediated environments can substitute for hypothetical actions.

Emerging technologies challenge us to rethink conventional ideas about learning from and with media by reminding us that we humans are embodied beings with a long heritage of interactions in complex spatiotemporal and quasi-social environments--a heritage much older than our use of symbols and language. Like other organisms whose capabilities are shaped by niche or occupation, our modes of perception are adapted to opportunities for action in the environment. The conclusion of this chapter examines problems that can result when media technologies so degrade opportunities for integrating action with perception that users face a restricted range of options for moral thought and behavior.

Footnotes

1.Realia (Latin, realis, relating to things):(a) objects that may be used as teaching aids but were not made for the purpose and (b) real things, actual facts, especially as distinct from theories about them (1987 Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Volume III Supplement). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

2.A situation can be defined as a structured relation between two or more objects. A MIROS is a mental representation of such a structured relationship. If perception is understood to be acquisition of information about the environment, percepts are not considered to be MIROS.

3. Here thermodynamics (or bioenergetics) sets the boundary conditions. Yet real events are controlled by rate processes (barriers, compartments, enzymes, etc.) that are both biotic and abiotic. As Hawkins notes, ". . . the reality of chance is not contravened by the hypothesis of "act, deterministic laws of motion, for these do not give a complete account of physical systems, which also have a certain number of degrees of freedom represented by spatio-temporal variables ... the nondynamical premises of thermodynamics are of the kind--namely, premises of probability--that complement the laws of motion.... The most remarkable consequence of this development (Maxwell & Boltzmann's kinetic theory of heat) was that entropy reappeared in the new theory, not as a phenomenological variable measurable in the heat laboratory but as a parameter of the probability law describing the statistical behavior of large systems of particles, and was definable far outside the experimental range of ordinary calorimetry. As a result, thermodynamics received an extension of the range of phenomena to which it could be applied, becoming a truly universal science. The dimensionless variable (entropy' ) reappeared in the formulation of statistical mechanics as a nonmechanical variable--namely, as a parameter of the Probability law characterizing the phase?space distribution of the system being described. In the meaning of this parameter was hidden the final explanation of the apparent contradiction between the symmetry of time direction in dynamics and its asymmetry in thermodynamics (1964, p. 194).

4.The natural retinal image consists of a binocular pair of ordinal structures of adjacencies and of successive transpositions and transformations of region of texture delimited by steps or margins, which are characterized by gradients and changes in gradients" (Reed on Gibson, 1988, p. 136).