book excerpt from The Media Ecosystem: Reoccupying the Collective Imagination

Media's collective "myth space" is shifting from the topdown, transmission-based media of the Industrial Age to ritual communication. Ritual draws on the ancient traditions at the root of communication: commune, commonness, community, and communion. Through the occupation and reclamation of public spaces and the cultural commons--done in the spirit of conviviality, democracy, and connectivity--we can chart a new course of planetary evolution. When these physical spaces hybridize with global networks, they create an interconnected swarm of raised consciousness.

To this end, we can instigate a kind of media occupation that accelerates the emergent democratization of our collective imagination. Occupy, a transient verb, represents movement and transition in a number of ways: (1) seizing possession or control, (2) dwelling or residing in time or space, (3) residing as owner or tenant, (4) engaging attention, and (5) filling or performing a function. It should not be thought of as a noun or an end, but rather an action. Occupation doesn't mean taking over the TV studios or editorial offices of corporate media. It means staking a position as a node within a network that transcends the top-down propaganda machines of the past. Like the fluid media spaces we engage on a daily basis, sites of occupation are provisional, liminal zones. They politicize and socialize according to the form they take. These five dimensions are expressed by the following characteristics:

• Seizing control. The past five hundred years of colonization have resulted in the corporate occupation and theft of the global commons from Earth's human and nonhuman inhabitants. The consolidation of corporate control is leveraged by the monopolization of the symbolic order. Because media represent the planetary communications commons, such a space must remain open, transparent, diverse, and democratic. Occupying the media means reclaiming the cultural commons and envisioning alternate realities beyond the corporatocracy's vision of world enclosure.
• Dwelling in time or space. Colonization resulted in a disruption of our ancient sense of time and space, breaking our perceptual bonds with living systems. The antidote requires that we engage a participatory cosmology that reintegrates time and space into a shared reality that extends to global ecology. Our minds and bodies are designed to interact and engage with living systems. The rupture with and virtualization of living systems necessitates that we integrate our perception to acknowledge, respect, and engage the nonhuman world. Media should serve the purpose of making these connections more real and significant.
• Residing. We reside within embedded landscapes, from how we connect our senses with the environment to the bioregions that feed and nurture us. Occupying the media means the reinhabiting of not just public spaces but living systems. By hybridizing local issues with global movements, these actions glocalize the reclamation of the commons. Media occupation extends beyond the internet, cell phones, plazas, parks, and streets to how we inhabit the landscape of our lifeworld and within our own sense perception.
• Engaging attention. The colonizers' most precious commodity is our attention. Daily complacency and inattention enable the commodities system's ecocidal assault on the planet. Additionally, colonized media repackages and sells the time we spend doing things with media. Through media mindfulness we can allocate our energy through the careful application of our attention so that we no longer manufacture consciousness for the benefit of the corporatocracy.
• Performing a function. When one occupies a specific position within an organization (whether formal or informal), it entails a set of practices, skills, relationships, and expectations. It also means belonging to communities of practice with unspoken guidelines and norms. Whether working in traditional media companies and marketing firms, producing activist media, participating in education, or engaging in daily media practice, our global emergency calls for explicit ethics. Green cultural citizenship means articulating and thinking about the ethical orientation of our work, and engaging in mindful practice founded on a moral framework that puts the commons and the sacredness of life at the center of our attention.

Media occupation means applying green cultural citizenship to media ecosystems. Every media portal offers the chance for individuals to make the choice of whether to perpetuate the system of conquest and destruction or to become part of a greater evolution in which consciousness and connection build an Earth Democracy. Integral to this evolution is the reintegration of ecological intelligence into our daily practice, in particular how we use and make media. Media occupation and green cultural citizenship cannot be prescribed. There is no singular handbook or manual to direct its activities; the form of its practice comes through its doing and not through description or ideology. These particular practices emerge in the same way that dreaming merges creativity and learning to create new pathways of understanding.

The one thing we can be sure of is that the planet calls upon us to take action. Either we continue to reproduce the colonizers' planet-destroying delusions, or we restore the mediasphere's power balance by embracing the one advantage we have: our collective imagination. As such, we are too big to fail.

You are the ultimate mediator. As a medium of the planet's spirit, channel wisely.

From The Media Ecosystem: What Ecology Can Teach Us about Responsible Media Practice by Antonio LÃ ³pez, published by Evolver Editions, an imprint of North Atlantic Books, copyright  2012 by Antonio LÃ ³pez. Reprinted by permission of publisher.