MAPPING THE TERRORTORY OF MEDIA ECOLOGY: A FEMPOETICS.

MASS media; COMMUNICATION methodology; GENERAL semantics; PHENOMENOLOGY; LANGUAGE & languages; HERMENEUTICS

According to H´elene Cixous,"woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently from their bodies... Woman must put herself into the text -- into the world and into history -- by her own movement."1 Read through French Feminist theorists, H´elene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Kabbalistic hermeneutics, this essay posits some semantically playful and interventive strategies into what has historically been seen as a somewhat male dominated discourse. Offering gendered models of language use, it points toward more inclusive economies of exchange. If Gregory Bateson's 1972 axiom,"a difference that makes a difference,"2 then, it's crucial that we not only listen differently but speak / write in new ways. As Lance Strate points out,"if media ecology is concerned with the way that we do things and the differences among the means, methods and modes that we employ; the situations, context and relationships that we act within, the forms, substances, codes, technologies and techniques that we utilize,"3 then mediating language in new ways, can and will inevitably lead to powerfully transformative ways of thinking, and being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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