# Mediology

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{{Short description|Cultural transmission theory by Régis Debray}}
{{Refimprove|date=November 2014}}
'''Mediology''' (French: ''médiologie'') broadly indicates a wide-ranging method for the analysis of [cultural transmission](/source/cultural_transmission) in society and across societies, a method which challenges the conventional idea that 'technology is not culture'. The mediological method pays specific attention to the role of organisations and technical innovations, and the ways in which these can ensure the potency of cultural transmission - and thus the transformation of ideas into a civilisational worldview capable of sustained action.

==Overview==
The term was first coined and introduced in French as "médiologie" by the French intellectual [Régis Debray](/source/R%C3%A9gis_Debray) in the "Teachers, Writers, Celebrities" section of his book ''Le pouvoir intellectuel en France'', (Editions Ramsay, 1979). The English form of the term became more widely known and respected in the English-speaking world with the publication of the key text on mediology in English, Debray's ''Transmitting Culture'' (University of Columbia Press, 2004). Mediology was taught for the first time in the Sorbonne (Paris) in 2007.

The practice of mediology is not a science, and thus is able to range across academic disciplines. The main areas involved are those of longitudinal history (the history of technologies, the history of the book, the histories and theories of aesthetics) and also research in communications and information theory.

Mediology is not a narrow specialist area of contemporary academic knowledge (as [media sociology](/source/media_sociology) is), nor does it aspire to be a precise science of signs (as [semiotics](/source/semiotics) does). It differs from the models put forward by [communication studies](/source/communication_studies), in that its focus is not isolated individuals and a fleeting few moments of communication. Instead mediologists study the cultural transmission of [religion](/source/religion)s, ideologies, the arts and political ideas in society, and across societies, over a time period that is usually to be measured in months, decades or millennia. Debray argues that mediology "would like to bring to light the function of [medium](/source/Media_(communication)) in all its forms, over a long time span - since the birth of writing. And without becoming obsessed by today's media."<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1999/08/DEBRAY/12314|title=Qu'est-ce que la médiologie ?, par Régis Debray (Le Monde diplomatique, août 1999)|date=August 1999 |publisher=Monde-diplomatique.fr|accessdate=13 November 2014}}</ref>

Mediology must thus closely examine the methods used for the memorising, transmission, and displacement of cultural knowledge in any [milieu](/source/milieu). But it must balance its understanding of these with an equally close study of our individual modes of belief, thoughts, and competing social organisations. Mediology must further understand that such transmission is not simply happening within a lofty [linguistic](/source/linguistic) or textual discourse, but that transmission takes an equally valid concrete form in which "material technologies and symbolic forms"<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1999/08/DEBRAY/12314|title=Qu'est-ce que la médiologie ?, par Régis Debray (Le Monde diplomatique, août 1999)|date=August 1999 |publisher=Monde-diplomatique.fr|accessdate=13 November 2014}}</ref> combine to produce things such as [rituals](/source/rituals), [architecture](/source/architecture), [flags](/source/flags), special sites, customs, [typefaces](/source/typefaces) and [book binding](/source/book_binding)s, smells and sounds, [bodily gestures and postures](/source/body_language), all of which have a potent anchoring role in cultural transmission among ordinary people.

Debray further points to the need to consider the role in transmission of all manner of non-media technical-cultural inventions, especially those of new forms of transportation. He gives the historical example of the [bicycle](/source/bicycle), which he suggests was historically associated with: the rise of a democratic rational individualism; a new role for women in advanced societies; and the new kinetic ideas expressed in early [modernist](/source/modernist) art and cinema.

A mediologist might thus make an examination "within a system" (e.g. of systems of book production, of authors and publishers), or of "the interaction between systems" (e.g. how [painting](/source/painting) and [early photography](/source/early_photography) influenced each other), or even of "the interactions across systems" (e.g. the ways in which symbolic transmission of systematic knowledge is brought to intersect with the material history of actual transportation - such as desert trading routes and ancient religion, [telegraph](/source/telegraph) and railroad, the radio and airplanes, television and satellites, mobile phones and cars).

Debray is generally critical of some of the ideas of [Marshall McLuhan](/source/Marshall_McLuhan) (whom he sees as being overly [technologically determinist](/source/Technological_determinism)), and of the French [sociologist](/source/sociologist) [Pierre Bourdieu](/source/Pierre_Bourdieu). He also tries to step beyond [Antonio Gramsci](/source/Antonio_Gramsci), in that he suggests that an ideology cannot be comprehended in ideological terms alone.

==Criticisms==
Criticisms of mediology in English so far have been found in two short book reviews and one article.  The first, by the screenwriter [Yvette Bíró](/source/Yvette_Biro) (''Wide Angle'' magazine, Vol.18, No.1, January 1996), was a four-page book review of Debray's ''Vie et Mort de l'Image'', in which she claimed to have discerned "traces of a strong, vulgar [Marxist](/source/Marxist) school of thought".

The second review, by [Pramod Nayor](/source/Pramod_Nayor) of the University of Hyderabad (''Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory'', Vol.8, No.1, Winter 2006) was a review of the English translation of ''Transmitting Culture'' (2004).  In concluding the review Nayor notes the similarities of some aspects and directions of mediology to [Birmingham School cultural studies](/source/Centre_for_Contemporary_Cultural_Studies) ranging from "[Raymond Williams](/source/Raymond_Williams) through [Stuart Hall](/source/Stuart_Hall_(cultural_theorist))". Nayor also notes that recent philosophers and historians of science - he cites [Bruno Latour](/source/Bruno_Latour), [Eugene Thacker](/source/Eugene_Thacker) and [Dwight Atkinson](/source/Dwight_Atkinson) - have also examined science in relation to "intersecting cultural, ethnic, economic and iconographic 'bases' of the transmission of culture"

An article by Steven Maris in ''Fibreculture'' No.12 [http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue12/issue12_maras.html] similarly suggests that Debray is too firmly embedded in "the French academic scene" and that thus "Debray's explicit engagement with other national scholarly traditions of media, communications and cultural studies in the works mentioned above is minimal". Maris also notes that mediology "predates much of the [current academic] interest in networked cultures and new media".

Physicists [Alan Sokal](/source/Alan_Sokal) and [Jean Bricmont](/source/Jean_Bricmont) have criticized Debray's work for using [Gödel's theorem](/source/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems) as a metaphor without understanding its basic ideas, in their book ''[Fashionable Nonsense](/source/Fashionable_Nonsense)''. Debray engaged in dialogue with Bricmont in a 2003 book titled "À l'ombre des lumières : Débat entre un philosophe et un scientifique", which so far has not been translated into English.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.alencon.fr/alencon/Main;jsessionid=DCNAOEIEBKEB?ISUM_ID=center&ISUM_SCR=nwExternalServiceScr&ISUM_CIPH=T9aJnOHAgwQV8T2hIQ5D3Du3v4I5zbXVbG3CxvkJy7s_&ISUM_URL=rtE--JVQ7nRU10QjZURxmHAxjLLIW3DXPzmc29-XDq1dc8FTO2YT0563J3xcF8aK |accessdate=August 19, 2009 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20090816160928/http://www.alencon.fr/alencon/Main |archivedate=August 16, 2009 |title=Alençon }}</ref>

Despite such criticisms, the six-volume ''New Dictionary of the History of Ideas'' (2004) wrote of Debray that "His achievement is to have synthesized these earlier arguments into a practice with a powerful political project ahead of it." (Vol.4, page 1394).

==See also==
*[Communication studies](/source/Communication_studies)
*[Walter Benjamin](/source/Walter_Benjamin)
*[History of technology](/source/History_of_technology)
*[History of ideas](/source/History_of_ideas)
*[Meme](/source/Meme)s
*[Memetics](/source/Memetics)
*[Cultural behavior](/source/Cultural_behavior)
*[Cultural selection theory](/source/Cultural_selection_theory)
*[Cultural reproduction](/source/Cultural_reproduction)
*[Evolutionary epistemology](/source/Evolutionary_epistemology)
*[Tipping point (sociology)](/source/Tipping_point_(sociology))
*[Taste (sociology)](/source/Taste_(sociology))
*[Diffusion of innovations](/source/Diffusion_of_innovations)

==Notes==
<references/>

==External links==
* The French revue of mediology ''[http://www.mediologie.org/ MediuM]'' (mostly in French, some English).
* [http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue12/issue12_maras.html "On Transmission: A Metamethodological Analysis (after Régis Debray)"] by Steven Maras, University of Sydney.  ''FibreCulture'' issue 12.
* [https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.01/debray_pr.html Interview with Debray]
* [http://www.regisdebray.com/ Régis Debray's website]
* [http://www.merzeau.net/ Louise Merzeau (French mediologist)]
* [http://www.huyghe.fr François-Bernard Huyghe (French mediologist)]
* [http://www.mediologie.avinus.de/category/mediologie-als-methode/ Forum Mediologie (Germany)]

Category:Theories of aesthetics
Category:Communication
Category:Memetics

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Adapted from the Wikipedia article [Mediology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediology) by Wikipedia contributors ([contributor history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediology?action=history)). Available under [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Changes may have been made.