As a professor of media and communication at East Tennessee State University, I teach courses in media theory, multimedia production and strategic communication, and I also research and write about media ecology. Media ecology is the study of how media function not merely as “tools” or “content,” but as environments that shape human perception, thought and culture.[1]
Media as Environments
Marshall McLuhan is perhaps the best-known media ecologist. The Canadian scholar became a household name in the 1960s by coining the mantra “the medium is the message.”[2] An adult convert to Roman Catholicism, McLuhan lamented what he saw as Western culture’s abandonment of its oral/aural heritage and its increasing immersion in visual media. Because of his influence on how we understand and think about media, Wired magazine dubbed him its patron saint.
In “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,” McLuhan wrote, “Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act — the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.”[3] In other words, the media we use recalibrate our five senses, or “sensorium,” in such a way that our perceptions become distorted.
Perhaps the most prominent contemporary media ecologist is Nicholas Carr. His 2010 book, “The Shallows,” explores new media technologies’ negative impact on individuals and society and was runner up for the Pulitzer Prize. Carr calls the internet the “ultimate distraction technology” and suggests that brain chemistry — and thus consciousness — are changing because of the sensorium perpetuated by the internet. Consider his description of browser and web page design:
By combining many different kinds of information on a single screen, the multimedia Net further fragments content and disrupts our concentration. A single Web page may contain a few chunks of text, a video or audio stream, a set of navigational tools, various advertisements, and several small software applications, or “widgets,” running in their own windows. We all know how distracting this cacophony of stimuli can be.[4]
In other words, internet media distort our sensory ratios, and in so doing, reorient our “liturgies of attention” — the routines and habits we develop in response to changes in mediated environments. Understood this way, Carr is very much a disciple of McLuhan in emphasizing the effects of technology on users. They both affirm that medium or form is more important than mere “content,” and that modern media are very good at disorienting and distracting us.
From Environment to Encounter
Last year, just as I began research for my book project on media ecology, my wife and I decided to “swim the Tiber.” After a season of prayer and discernment we were received into the Catholic Church — she at the Easter Vigil and me on Divine Mercy Sunday. (You can read more about our faith journey and how I came to have a spiritual affinity with the Society of Jesus here.)
Serendipitously (or providentially), in learning more about the Jesuits and their charism, I realized that Ignatian spirituality attends to many of the same things as media ecology. Ignatian spirituality, like media ecology, emphasizes the importance of attentive formation — that is, how the human person is shaped by inhabiting and abiding environments. In the Spiritual Exercises, exercitants enter reflectively into narrative environments, imagining scriptural scenes, perceiving characters’ motivations and movements, and discerning their own formation through the testing of spirits and the exercise of judgment. And media ecology, for its part, renders visible the otherwise hidden conditions of mediated environments.
Even though media ecology and Ignatian spirituality share an interest in the formative power of environments, they also complement one another by informing the other’s “blind spot.” For example, McLuhan’s media ecology, shaped in part by Thomistic concerns for form and proportion, offers a powerful account of how media structure perception through extensions and sensory ratios. Yet this account tends to remain at the level of environmental analysis. There is not much emphasis on story in McLuhan’s thinking. An Ignatian approach deepens media ecology by introducing dramatic participation — inviting the subject not merely to inhabit mediated environments, but to discern, imaginatively engage and respond within them.
And Ignatian spirituality can learn from media ecology. Although the Spiritual Exercises draws exercitant’s attention to the senses — sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch — which is a very media ecology “move,” the Ignatian imagination can benefit from more sustained focus on the largely invisible media environments that form and reform the human sensorium. A medieval monk doing the Exercises, for example, would’ve had a very different experience than you or me doing a weekend retreat in upstate New York. His sensorium, shaped by the media ecologies of his day, would’ve predisposed him to a certain capacity for attention, focus and memory that our own media ecologies do not so readily yield.
If media ecology teaches us that media form the sensorium, Ignatius teaches us how to inhabit that sensorium as an encounter with Christ. In an age of total mediation, the task is no longer simply to analyze environments but to discern within them — to recognize where Christ is present, where the spirits are at work and where one is being called to respond. Media ecology, in this light, becomes not only a theory of communication, but a pedagogy of attention ordered toward love. Ignatius’ method is not an abstract theology but a sensory pedagogy — a means to counteract the systemic and largely invisible forces wrought by modern media technologies. In McLuhan’s day those included radio and television, but his ideas, and Ignatian spirituality, are just as (if not more) relevant today.
To Find God in All Things
McLuhan did not often make explicit theological claims in his writing, but one major exception, in “The Medium and the Light,” reveals the Christian metaphysic at the heart of his media theorizing: “In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.”[5]
This is echoed, in theological language, by many of the tradition’s prominent thinkers. The 20th-century Swiss-German theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar insisted that, in the Incarnation, the Word does not merely communicate truth but becomes its very form (Gestalt), such that Christ himself is both the revelation and the mode of its disclosure.[6] This conviction reflects a broader sacramental logic at the heart of Christian theology — most explicitly in eucharistic doctrine — where Christ is not simply signified but made present, and where form and content, sign and reality, are held together rather than opposed. Balthasar was a Jesuit priest until he left the Society to found the Community of St. John, but his theology remained deeply Ignatian.
It’s no accident, I think, that one of the leading contemporary scholars of media ecology is a Jesuit. Paul Soukup, SJ, who’s been a guest on an episode of the AMDG podcast, is the author of numerous books on media ecology.[7] Another luminary in the field, McLuhan’s student Walter Ong, SJ, was also a Jesuit priest. Their Ignatian sensibilities, like Balthasar’s, afford relevant insights into the relationship between form, story and Christian imagination. What we find in media ecology, and in Ignatian spirituality, is that perception — if not formed through disciplined engagement of the senses and couched within the Christian story — is at the mercy of cacophonous media environments. Our capacity to perceive God’s presence, and to discern his call, is strained by the ubiquity and intensity of digital life.
When asked in an interview what the Catholic faith meant to him, McLuhan replied, “Prayer and paying attention.”[8] I can’t imagine a more Ignatian response, nor a better antidote to the disorientation wrought by modern media ecologies. It’s how we find God in all things.
[1] See Understanding Media Ecology series, ed. Lance Strate (New York: Peter Lang), esp. Dennis D. Cali, Mapping Media Ecology: Introduction to the Field, vol. 4 (2017).
[2] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 7.
[3] McLuhan, Understanding Media, 41.
[4] Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, updated ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), 91.
[5] Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, ed. Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010), 103.
[6] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982).
[7] See, inter alia, Paul A. Soukup, A Media Ecology of Theology: Communicating Faith Throughout the Christian Tradition (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2022).
[8] Brett Robinson, “The Patron Saint of Media Studies,” Church Life Journal (McGrath Institute for Church Life, University of Notre Dame), June 29, 2018, https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-patron-saint-of-media-studies/.