By Tom Veltre | March 19, 2013 at 05:33 PM EDT | 1 comment

So, why the new blog you may ask?

Well, aside from my activities as a filmmaker, I have a long history as an academic in the rather misleadingly named field of Media Ecology. (all the years that I was going to grad school on the Bronx Zoo's tuition assistance program, I'm sure they thought I was studying "Nature Films"...)

You can learn more about Media Ecology here, but for our general purposes it can best be described as a form of criticism that takes a perspective that the media we use are the enviroment which contains, shapes, influences and/or determines our culture.

I want to explore a few ideas here, with the help of some willing volunteers I hope to recruit from some of the really interesting thinkers I have met over the years - both from the Media Ecology world and from some of the REAL ecologists it has been my pleasure to work with.

More of that to follow in the next post.

Let me leave you with a thought I had recently about my childhood.

I think I was always destined to be a media critic because of the influence I had growing up with the initials “TV”. When we were all little, my siblings used to play with me by twisting my ears and pushing my button nose and saying “You’re a TV – come on, show us some pictures!”

All the best,
Tom V.