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Paul Levinson was a doctoral student of Neil Postman in the 1970s. He organized the Tetrad Conference for Marshall McLuhan in 1978. He worked later with Eric McLuhan. A fun fact: Levinson is probably the only person in the world who possesses a personal voicemail from Marshall McLuhan. In August 1978. McLuhan called him to give feedback on his dissertation and left a message on his home phone (available on Levinson's podcast).1
Levinson belongs with that first cohort of younger colleagues of Postman and McLuhan. with Lance Strate. Susan B. Barnes. Thomas F. Gencarelli. and Casey Man Kong Lum,2 who formed the Media Ecology Association in 1998 and have led the entire movement since then. Levinson defended a dissertation on the "anthropotropic" theory of media evolution in 1978. The dissertation was published, with some adjustments (e.g.. different placement of footnotes) in 2017, under its original title Human Replay: A Theory of the Evolution of Media. The book is unique evidence of the early media ecological explorations and advances an original theory of media evolution, which has gained particular value due to the latest development of new media.
In the 1970s, the life span of a significant medium, such as TV, radio, or phone, was far longer than a human generation's life span. However, the periods of certain media's use started shrinking. It was clear when color TV, for example, was replacing monochrome TV. The world was stepping into an era in which the life span of a media generation was becoming shorter than a human generation. Today, new media are displacing each other at an increased pace. The "sequentiality" of media is visible, even tangible, to regular users. The idea that media might develop and offset each other within a certain general logic is becoming obvious. But this was not the case in the 1970s. Levinson was certainly a pioneer, if not the originator, of the very notion of media evolution.
Levinson's innovative and prescient take on media ecology was cemented by the model he called "anthropotropic." The anthropotropic model of media evolution holds that media evolve to better accommodate human needs in interactions with the environment. Mediating the environment, technologies must be compatible with human operational abilities. They must "replicate" the natural or "pre-technological"...