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Sphere ecology: Peter Sloterdijk's spatial-analytic approach to media environments
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Sphere ecology: Peter Sloterdijk's spatial-analytic approach to media environments

Ethan Stoneman
Explorations in media ecology, Vol.20(1), pp.55-71
01/03/2021

Abstract

Foam Society Globalization Marshall Mcluhan Media Ecology Peter Sloterdijk Spherolog
This article makes the case for reading the German philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk as a media ecologist. Tracing the media ecological implications of what is perhaps his most significant work, the three-volume Spheres project, it argues that Sloterdijk's spatial analysis of human habitats, what he terms spherology, can be interpreted as offering a promising, distinctive approach to the study of media as environments. By redescribing media as morpho-immunological spheres, or shared spatial interiors, Sloterdijk recasts both human existence and sociocultural change as the result of the interplay or mediation between a relative enclosure into a protective space and a world considered to be outside. This framework, which enables Sloterdijk to chart a grand narrative of globalization, yields a therapeutic methodological strategy by means of which media ecologists may increase the spacious dimensions of the world while strengthening the immune systems of newly designed artificial atmospheres.

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