Dear MEA Collaegues – I want to introduce you to a new journal
systems. connecting matter, life, culture and technology.
The URL for the journal is www.systems-journal.eu
The journal was started by my friend Wolfgang Hofkirchner and his colleague Manfred Fuellsack both of whom are systems scientists.
Manfred is Editor-in-Chief of the journal and is at the Institute of Systems Sciences, Innovation and Sustainability Research, University of Graz, Austria.
Wolfgang is the Supervisory Editor and is at the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science and the Vienna University of Technology
I have the honour to be an Associate Editor of the journal with a mandate to recruit papers that deal with media ecology as a systems approach.
Here is a description of the focus and scope of the new journal
Focus and Scope
systems. connecting matter, life, culture and technology publishes the proceedings of the EMCSR and peer reviewed papers on systems, complexity and network research, as well as insightful survey papers.
The journal endorses cross-disciplinary approaches and welcomes contributions that elucidate commonalities and compatibilities in natural, artificial, and social systems.
Among the domains and topics covered are
• cybernetics
• general systems theory
• complex adaptive systems
• theory of social systems
• systems biology
• economic systems
• technosocial systems
• media ecology <– (please note)
• systems design
• modeling
• complexity
• network theory
• computational and information theory
So why am I introducing you to this journal and soliciting your participation. It is because I believe that media ecology is a systems science and I believe that we should make use of this journal to publish media ecology papers that make use of a systems approach. If media ecology is to have an impact outside of our own community we need to interact with scholars in closely allied fields like systems science. Marshall McLuhan was a systems thinkers who was influenced by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Boulding, Bucky Fuller and Norbert Weiner. McLuhan made use of feed forward in is book War and Peace in the Global Village: An Inventory of Some of the Current Spastic Situations That Could Be Eliminated by More Feedforward (McLuhan, Fiore and Angel 1968). Feedforward, one of the key concepts of general systems theory that McLuhan actually picked up from I. A. Richards, one of his professors at Cambridge. I. A. Richards actually coined the term feedforward and was certainly a systems thinker even though he was a rhetorician. I have argued in my book McLuhan Misunderstood, soon to be released, that McLuhan was a systems thinker.
I intend to write a paper for this new journal developing the thesis in greater depth that McLuhan was a systems thinker. I would like to edit a special edition of the journal, a collection of essays that develops the thesis that media ecology and/or the writings of McLuhan and other media ecologists incorporate a general systems approaches. I also would like to organize a panel discussion on this topic at the MEA convention in Toronto. I invite you to submit a paper for this collection and participate on the panel. Please email me if you are interested in this project to submit a paper for the journal and/or participate on the panel Media Ecology as a Systems Science – Bob
Blog de Octavio Islas 