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Past MEA Award Recipients

The Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology

2000 – Neil Postman for Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future
2001 – Thomas J. Farrell for Walter Ong’s Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication
2002 – Douglas Rushkoff for Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say
2003 – Frederick Wasser for Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR
2004 – Francis Fukuyama for Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
2005 – Donald N. Wood for The Unraveling of the West: The Rise of Postmodernism and the Decline of Democracy
2006 – Thomas de Zengotita for Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It
2007 – Peter K. Fallon for Printing, Literacy, and Education in Eighteenth Century Ireland: Why the Irish Speak English
2008 – Richard Barbrook for Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village
2009 – Rick Williams and Julianne Newton for Visual Communication: Integrating Media, Art, and Science
2010 – Viktor Mayer-Schönberger for Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
2011 – Sheila Nayar for Cinematically Speaking: The Orality-Literacy Paradigm for Visual Narrative
2012 – Barbie Zelizer for About to Die: How News Images Move the Public
2013 – John Miles Foley for On Reflection: An Essay on Technology, Education, and the Status of Thought in the Twenty-First Century
2014 – Ellen Rose for Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind
2015 – Fred Turner for The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties
2016 – Elena Lamberti for McLuhan’s Mosaic: Probing the Literary Origins of Media Studies
2017 – Tim Wu for The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

The Walter Benjamin Award for Outstanding Article in the Field of Media Ecology

2000 – Walter J. Ong, S.J. for “Digitization Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of Writing and Today’s Computers”
2001 – Pablo J. Boczkowski for “Mutual Shaping of Users and Technologies in a National Virtual Community”
2002 – Erik P. Bucy and Kimberly S. Gregson for “Media Participation: A Legitimizing Mechanism of Mass Democracy”
2003 – Alan Randolph Kluver for “The Logic of New Media in International Affairs”
2004 – Susan B. Barnes for “The Development of Graphical User Interfaces and Their Influence on the Future of Human–Computer Interaction”
2005 – Sheila J. Nayar for “Invisible Representation: The Oral Contours of a National Popular Cinema”
2006 – Edward Wachtel for “Did Picasso and Da Vinci, Newton and Einstein, The Bushman and the Englishman See the Same Thing When They Faced the East at Dawn? Or, Some Lessons I Learned From Marshall McLuhan About Perception, Time, Space, and the Order of the World”
2007 – Corey Anton for “Playing with Bateson: Denotation, Logical Types, and Analog and Digital Communication”
2008 – Robert MacDougall for “Identity, Electronic Ethos, and Blogs: A Technologic Analysis of Symbolic Exchange on the New News Medium”
2009 – Thomas J. Bruneau for “Time, Change, and Sociocultural Communication: A Chronemic Perspective”
2010 – Brenton J. Malin for “Mediating Emotion: Technology, Social Science, and Emotion in the Payne Fund Motion-Picture Studies”
2011 – Keith N. Hampton for “Internet Use and the Concentration of Disadvantage: Glocalization and the Urban Underclass”
2012 – James C. Morrison for “Acoustic, Visual, and Aural Space: The Quest for Virtual Reality in Musical Reproduction”
2013 – Mara Mills for “Hearing Aids and the History of Electronics Miniaturization”
2014 – Brett Lunceford for “Posthuman Visions: Creating the Technologized Body”
2015 – David Trippet for “Facing Digital Realities: Where Media Do Not Mix”
2016 – Casey Lum for “Media Ecology: Contexts, Concepts and Currents”
2017 – Brett Lunceford for “Chained to the Dialer, or Frederick Taylor Reaches out and Touches Someone”

The Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Social Interaction

2004 – Corey Anton for Selfhood and Authenticity
2005 – Aaron Ben Ze’ev for Love Online: Emotions on the Internet
2006 – David Berreby for Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind
2007 – Richard A. Lanham for The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information
2008 – Paul Mason Fotsch for Watching the Traffic Go By: Transportation and Isolation in Urban America
2009 – Rich Ling for New Tech, New Times: How Mobile Communication is Reshaping Social Cohesion
2010 – Kenneth J. Gergen for Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community
2011 – Richard S. Hallam for Virtual Selves, Real Persons: A Dialogue Across Disciplines
2012 – Corey Anton for Sources of Significance: Worldly Rejuvenation and Neo-Stoic Heroism
2013 – Valerie V. Peterson for Sex, Ethics and Communication: A Humanist approach to Conversations on Intimacy
2014 – Susan Barnes for Social Networks: From Text to Video
2015 – danah boyd for It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens
2016 – David J. Alworth for Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form
2017 – Gary T. Marx for Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of high Technology

The Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form

2000 – Robert K. Logan for The Sixth Language: Learning a Living in the Internet Age
2001 – Raymond Gozzi, Jr. for The Power of Metaphor in the Age of Electronic Media
2002 – Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone for The Form of News: A History
2003 – N. Katherine Hayles for Writing Machines
2004 – Susan Sontag for Regarding the Pain of Others
2005 – Heike Wiese for Numbers, Language, and the Human Mind
2006 – Guy Deutscher for The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention
2007 – Martin H. Levinson for Sensible Thinking for Turbulent Times
2008 – Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites for No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy
2009 – Karin Barber for The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond
2010 – Michael Wurtz for Enduring Words: Literary Narrative in a Chnaging Media Ecology
2011 – Linda G. Elson for Paradox Lost: A cross-Contextual Definition of Levels of Abstraction
2012 – Whitney Davis for A General Theory of Visual Culture
2013 – David Bellos for Is that a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything
2014 – Brian Lennon for In Babel’s Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States
2015 – Michael Serazio for Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing
2016 – Jeff Scheible for Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation
2017 – Katherine Biers for Virtual Modernism: Writing and Technology in the Progressive Era

The Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture

2002 – Susan B. Barnes for Online Connections: Internet Interpersonal Relationships and Stuart Biegel for Beyond Our Control? Confronting the Limits of Our Legal System in the Age of Cyberspace
2003 – Nancy A. Walker for Shaping Our Mothers’ World: American Women’s Magazines
2004 – Thomas L. Friedman for Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11
2005 – Robert Albrecht for Mediating the Muse: A Communications Approach to Music, Media and Cultural Change
2006 – Charlton D. McIlwain for When Death Goes Pop: Death, Media and the Remaking of Community
2007 – David MacDougall for The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses
2008 – Paul Rutherford for A World Made Sexy: Freud to Madonna
2009 – Tom Boellstorff for Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human
2010 – Diego Gambetta for Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate
2011 – Lisa Brooks for The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast
2012 – Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh for Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong
2013 – Peter Lunefeld for The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as a Culture Machine
2014 – Kate Marshall for Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction
2015 – Dariusz Jemielniak for Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia
2016 – Caroline Levine for Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network
2017 – Alex Marland for Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control

The Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics

2000 – Paul Levinson for Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium
2001 – Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin for Remediation: Understanding New Media
2002 – Jack Lule for Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism
2003 – Emily Thompson for The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900—1933
2004 – Scott Eastham for Biotech Time-Bomb: How Genetic Engineering Could Irreversably Change Our World
2005 – Margaret Cassidy for Bookends: The Changing Media Environment of American Classrooms
2006 – Casey Man Kong Lum for Perspectives on Culture, Technology and Communication: The Media Ecology Tradition
2007 – Timothy C. Campbell for Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi and to Fred Turner for From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
2008 – Steve Dixon for Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation
2009 – Yvonne Spielmann for Video: The Reflexive Medium
2010 – Peter K. Fallon for The Metaphysics of Media: Towards an End of Postmodern Cynicism and the Construction of a Virtuous Reality
2011 – Marco Adria for Technology and Nationalism
2012 – Braden R. Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz for The Techno-Human Condition
2013 – Janet Sternberg for Misbehavior in Cyber Places: The Regulation of Online Conduct in Virtual Communities on the Internet
2014 – Brett Robinson for Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs
2015 – Brenton Malin for Feeling Mediated: A History of Media Technology and Emotion in America
2016 – Karen Rader and Victoria Cain Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century
2017 – Wendy Hui Kyong Chun for Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media

The Harold A. Innis Award for Outstanding Thesis or Dissertation in the Field of Media Ecology

2000 – Donna Flayhan for Marxism, Medium Theory, and American Cultural Studies: The Question of Determination
2001 – Lori Ramos for Self-Initiated Writing Practices and Conceptions of Writing Among Young Urban Adolescents
2002 – Janet Sternberg for Misbehavior in Cyber Places: The Regulation of Online Conduct in Virtual Communities on the Internet
2003 – Keith Hampton for Living the Wired Life in the Wired Suburb: Netville, Glocalization and Civil Society
2004 – Brian Cogan for Wired Worlds: An Analysis of Newspaper Coverage of the Personal Computer and the Internet
2005 – Mary Ann Allison for Gecyberschaft: A Theoretical Model for the Analysis of Emerging Electronic Communities
2006 – Susan Jacobson for Scrapbook of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: Hypertext and the Representation of History
2007 – Adriana Braga for Feminilidade Mediada por Computador: Interação Social no Circuito-Blogue [Computer-Mediated Femininity: Social Interaction on the Blog Circuit]
2008 – Stephanie Bennett for The Disappearance of Silence: A Dialectical Exploration of the Interpersonal Implications of Personal Mobile Media as Viewed through the Lens of Jacques Ellul’s La Technique
2009 – Catherine Alison Adams for PowerPoint and the Pedagogy of Digital Media Technology
2010 – Mogens Olesen for Survival of the Mediated: Speech, The Printing Press, and the Internet as Selection Mechanisms in Cultural Evolution
2011 – Joseph A. Kim for Marshall McLuhan’s Theological Anthropology
2012 – Macello Santos de Medeiros for O Lugar Na Comunicação: Um Estudo Sobre a Comunicação Locativa em Zonas Bluetooth
2013 – Yoni Van Den Eede for Amor Technologiae: Marshall McLuhan as a Philosopher of Technology –Steps Toward a Philosophy of Human-Media Relationships–
2014 – Helio César Hintze forEspetáculos e Invisibilidades do Discurso Legitimador do Turismo [Spectacles and Invisibilities of Legitimizing Discourse of Tourism]
2015 – No Award This Year
2016 – David James Paterno Technology Translated: The Communicational Facilitation of Medium
2017 – David Benjamin Landes for The Attention Situation: A Rhetorical Theory of Attention for Mediated Communication

The Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fictional Work

2003 – Paul Levinson for The Consciousness Plague
2004 – William Gibson for Pattern Recognition
2005 – John G. McDaid for “Keyboard Practice, Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals”
2006 – Rick Moody for The Diviners
2007 – Janna Levin for A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
2008 – Jean-Claude Carrière for Please, Mr. Einstein
2009 – Geraldine Brooks for People of the Book
2010 – Steve Tomasula for TOC (a new media novel)
2011 – Chuck Wachtel for 3/03
2012 – Shumeet Baluja for The Silicon Jungle and Robert K. Blechman for Executive Severance
2013 – Robin Sloan for Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
2014 – No Award This Year
2015 – David Eggers for The Circle
2016 – Ernest Cline for Ready Player One
2017 – Natasha Stagg for Surveys: A Novel

The John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in the Field of Media Ecology

2000 – Jerome Agel for The Medium is the Massage (audio CD and book)
2001 – Douglas Rushkoff for The Merchants of Cool (television documentary produced for the PBS program Frontline, initially aired February 26, 2001)
2002 – William Bly and John McDaid for Media Ecology Unplugged (audio music recording, available on CD and as downloadable MP3 files at www.infomonger.com/meunplug/.
2003 – Kevin McMahon for McLuhan’s Wake (video documentary produced by Primitive Entertainment and the National Film Board of Canada)
2004 – John Bishop and Harald Prins for Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! (documentary film; DVD distributed by Media Generation)
2005 – Toni Urbano and NYU-TV Productions for A Conversation with Neil Postman (video documentary)
2006 – Deiren Masterson for McLuhan Way: In Search of Truth (video documentary)
2007 – Michael Wesch for The Machine is Us/ing Us (video on YouTube.com)
2008 – Eric Goodman for Thus Spoke the Spectacle (videos and website)
2009 – Peter C. Rollins for The Benjamin Lee Whorf Legacy (CD-ROM)
2010 – Barry Vacker for Space Times Square (video)
2011 – Nora Bateson for An Ecology of Mind (documentary film)
2012 – Robert Albrecht for Song of the Poet (musical composition on CD)
2013 – Laureano Ralon for the Figure/Ground Communication Website
2014 – David Cayley
2015 – Alex Kuskis
2016 – Eugene Marlow for “Zikkaron/Kristallnacht” A Family Story
2017 – Lawrence Azerrad, Tim Daly and David Pescovitz for Voyager Golden Record: 40th Anniversary Edition

The Louis Forsdale Award for Outstanding Educator in the Field of Media Ecology

2000 – Christine L. Nystrom
2001 – Joshua Meyrowitz
2002 – Edmund Carpenter
2003 – James W. Carey
2004 – Gary Gumpert
2005 – Frank E. X. Dance
2006 – Terence P. Moran
2007 – Octavio Islas
2008 – Lee Thayer
2009 – Bruce E. Gronbeck
2010 – Salvatore J. Fallica
2011 – Alex Kuskis
2012 – Janet Sternberg
2013 – Clifford Christians
2014 – Casey Lum
2015 – Fernando Gutierrez
2016 – Valerie V. Peterson
2017 – Stephanie Gibson

The Jacques Ellul Award for Outstanding Media Ecology Activism

2000 – Stephanie B. Gibson
2001 – Dennis Gallagher
2002 – Parry Aftab
2003 – Ronald J. Deibert
2004 – The Reverend Everett C. Parker
2005 – Jerry Brown
2006 – Andrew Rasiej
2007 – Donna Flayhan
2008 – Margot Hardenbergh
2009 – Mark Lipton
2010 – Eric Goodman and Mike Stevens
2011 – Lisa Prins
2012 – Scott Harrison and charity: water
2013 – Aaron Swartz
2014 – David Gill
2015 – Noam Chomsky
2016 – Rosi Braidotti
2017 – Senator Bernie Sanders

The James W. Carey Award for Outstanding Media Ecology Journalism

2007 – Philip Marchand
2008 – Marvin Kitman
2009 – Thomas de Zengotita
2010 – Eugene Marlow
2011 – David Hendy
2012 – David Carr
2013 – David Pogue
2014 – Megan Garber of The Atlantic
2015 – Thomas Friedman
2016 – Luca De Biase
2017 – Kevin Kelly

The Christine L. Nystrom Award for Career Achievement in Service to the Field of Media Ecology

2011 – Robert Barry Francos
2012 – Terence P. Moran
2013 – Thomas Gencarelli
2014 – James Morrison
2015 – Janet Sternberg
2016 – Paul Grosswiler
2017 – Paul Soukup

The Edmund S. Carpenter Award for Career Achievement in Editing in the Field of Media Ecology

2012 – Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup
2013 – Gary Gumpert
2014 – Eric McLuhan
2015 – Susan Drucker
2016 – Carlos Scolari
2017 – Edward Tywoniak

The Walter J. Ong Award for Career Achievement in Scholarship

2004 – Denise Schmandt-Besserat
2005 – James W. Carey
2006 – Elizabeth L. Eisenstein
2007 – Jay David Bolter
2008 – Joshua Meyrowitz
2009 – John Miles Foley
2010 – Don Ihde
2011 – Robert K. Logan
2012 – Sherry Turkle
2013 – Lance Strate
2014 – René Girard
2015 – Johanna Drucker
2016 – Luciano Floridi
2017 – Paul Heyer

The Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity

2004 – Douglas Rushkoff
2005 – Paul Levinson
2006 – Howard Rheingold
2007 – Eric McLuhan
2008 – Fritjof Capra
2009 – Alan Kay
2010 – Mary Catherine Bateson
2011 – Gary Gumpert
2012 – Jaron Lanier
2013 – Morris Berman
2014 – Ronald J. Deibert
2015 – Nicholas Carr
2016 – Bruce Sterling
2017 – Scott McCloud

The MEA Convention Top Paper Award

2003 – Arthur W. Hunt, III for “The Image Versus the Word: Old Story, New Twist: A Lament from a Christian Media Ecologist”
2004 – Kip Redick for “Theme Parks as Sacred Places and Commercial Sanctuaries”
2005 – Ellen Rose for “The Wiring of Bhutan: A Test Case for Media Ecology in the Non-Western World”
2006 – Davis Foulger for “Medium as an Ecology of Genres: Integrating Media Theory and Genre Theory” and Peter A. Maresco and Cheryl A. Casey for “Stories in Stone, Stories on Screen: An Examination of Increased Personalization of Cemetery Memorials”
2007 – Anne Pym for “Orality, Secondary Orality, and the Presence of the Word”
2008 – Stephanie Bennett for “The City’s Curse; The Church’s Plight: Technology, Communication and the Sacred”
2009 – Matthew A. Killmeier for “Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Disembodiment, Media, and Innis and Carey”
2010 – Claudia Springer for “Watch the Birdie: Image-Making and Wildlife Conservation”
2011 – Eric Jenkins for “Another Punctum”
2012 – Eric Jenkins for “Updating Narcissus, the Ur-Myth of Media, for the Digital Age”
2013 – Brett Lunceford for “Telepresence and the Ethics of Digital Cheating”
2014 – Kevin Healey for “Coercion, Consent, and the Struggle for Social Media”
2015 –
2016 – Paul Soukup for “Everyone’s Searching for a Savior: Film, Television, Theology, and Media Ecology”
2017 – Dennis Cali for “Sacramental View of McLuhan, Ong, and Carey”

The Linda Elson Scholar Award for the Top Student Paper at the MEA Convention

2003 – Lisa Hanson for “PRO-ANA, a Culture Remediated in Cyberspace”
2004 – Megan Rogers for “Taoism, Media Ecology, and the Reason the West Just Can’t ‘Dig it’”
2005 – Cuthbert Alexander for “Community Journalism: Hope for a Society Without Heroes” and Michael T. Zimmer for “Media Ecology and Value Sensitive Design: A Combined Approach to Understanding the Biases of Media Technology”
2006 – David Parisi for “Fingerbombing or ‘Touching Is Good’: The Cultural Construction of Technologized Touch”
2007 – Xiaoyan Xiang for “Walling-In and Walling Out”
2008 – Phil Rose for “René Girard as Media Ecologist”
2009 – Jason Kalin for “Toward a Rhetoric of Hybrid-Space Walking”
2010 – J. N. Beckham for “Food and Drink: Engaging the Logics of New Mediation”
2011 – Helma Sawatsky for “Anemone Theory: An Exploration of Digital Media as Phenomena”
2012 – Angela M. Cirucci for “First Person Paparazzi: Why Social Media Should Be Studied More Like Video Games”
2013 – Helma Sawatzky for “Reconfigurations: Unfolding the Spaces of Mobile Listening”
2014 – Mike Plugh for “The Global Village: Globalization and Media Ecology”
2015 –
2016 – Bryan Picciotta for “From the Ground to the Clouds: Minimalist and Maximalist Footwear in the Sport of Running”
2017 – Joni McBeth Turville for “If Email Could Speak, What Would It Say? Interviewing Objects in a Digital World”