Hidden Dimensions of Hall in Media Ecology

(1966) are canonic texts within the area of intercultural communication studies. Hall’s work is referenced in the majority of intercultural communication studies and it is commonly referenced in studies of international relations and cross-cultural corporate communication. Within the areas of North American Cultural Studies and Media Ecology, however, Hall’s work implicitly permeates the thinking and writing taking place yet is rarely explicitly pointed to as foundational. In this essay I explore the symmetry between Hall’s early definitions of communication and culture and the definitions used by leading cultural studies and media ecology scholars such as James Carey, Joshua Meyrowitz, and Walter Ong. I also discuss the symmetry between founding media ecologist Harold Adams Innis’s ideas on form, time, and space with Edward T. Hall’s work. The symmetry in definitions of communication between Hall, Carey, Myerowitz, and Ong and the symmetry in approaches to form, time, and space between the works of Hall and Innis are not the only reasons to state that Hall’s work represents neglected roots within Media Ecology. In the last section of this work I argue that Edward T. Hall’s theoretical ideas and sites of analysis are as central to the media ecology scholarship of Joshua Meyrowitz as are the ideas of Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan