Julia M. Hildebrand

Media are ‘extensions of man’, McLuhan (1994) famously noted. What if we were to understand this key principle of media ecology as media being extensions of men? To what extent are major communication technologies and other artefacts extensions of male and/or female faculties? Does the concept of ‘extension’ even adequately describe what ‘woman-’ and other ‘non-manmade’ artefacts look like and do? ‘We shape our tools and thereafter they

shape us’, argues Culkin (1967: 52) through a media ecological lens. Yet, who is ‘we’ and ‘us’?

Provocations like these and others inspire this invited special issue on ‘gender and media ecology’. In this guest editorial and the selection of articles, we seek to probe past, present and emerging relations between media and gender as well as productive fusions and frictions between media ecology and feminist/queer thinking. As an intellectual tradition (Strate 2017), media ecology emphasizes the influential role of technology for social and psychological patterns and orders. ‘The primacy of “relations” over “things”’ (Anton 2016: 127) is central in this approach. With such comprehensive attention to social and psychological relations, questions of gender along with race, ethnicity, class, age, disability and so on matter in the socio-historical study of technology and its impact on us. To further advance ‘socio-historical constructionism with teeth’, to use Anton’s (2016: 131) description of media ecology, we are tasked with continuously sharpening our awareness of taken-for-granted, in this case, gendered media environments. While this special issue focuses on ‘gender and media ecology’, it seeks to contribute to the holistic thinking that shapes this journal and field.