Our digital world is often described using terms such as immateriality and virtuality. The discourse of cloud computing is the latest in a long line of nebulous, dematerialising tropes which have come to dominate how we think about information and communication technologies. Digital Media Ecologies argues that such rhetoric is highly misleading, and that engaging with the key cultural, agential, ethical and political impacts of contemporary media requires that we do not just engage with the surface level of content encountered by the end users of digital media, but that we must additionally consider the affordances of software and hardware. Whilst numerous existing approaches explore content, software and hardware individually, Digital Media Ecologies provides a critical intervention by insisting that addressing contemporary technoculture requires a synthetic approach that traverses these three registers. Digital Media Ecologies re-envisions the methodological approach of media ecology to go beyond the metaphor of a symbolic information environment that exists alongside a material world of tantalum, turtles and tornados. It illustrates the social, cultural, political and environmental impacts of contemporary media assemblages through examples that include mining conflict-sustaining minerals, climate change blogging, iOS jailbreaking, and the ecological footprint of contemporary computing infrastructures. Alongside foregrounding the deleterious social and environmental impacts of digital technologies, the book considers numerous ways that these issues are being tackled by a heterogeneous array of activists, academics, hackers, scientists and citizens using the same technological assemblages that ostensibly cause these problems.
Author(s): Sy Taffel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic/Bloomsbury Publishing
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 257
Tags: Digital Media: Social Aspects, Cyberspace: Philosophy, Communication And Culture, Information society
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgements......Page 7
Introduction: Re-thinking media ecology......Page 8
Digital ecosystems and platforms......Page 10
Anthropocenic ecologies......Page 13
Scale and digital technoculture......Page 18
Digital infrastructures and inequalities......Page 21
Chapter outlines......Page 25
Part 1: Theorizing digital ecologies......Page 28
Chapter 1: Technology, complexity and agency......Page 30
Algorithmic trading......Page 31
Nonlinear agencies......Page 34
Assemblages......Page 43
Open systems and abstract machines......Page 50
Markets and cyborgs......Page 55
Chapter 2: Ecology, ethics and collectives......Page 61
Ethics and anthropocentricism......Page 64
The three ecologies......Page 69
Scale and network politics......Page 75
Rhizomatic and arborescent tendencies......Page 78
Process philosophy and politics......Page 80
Commodities and commonwealth......Page 84
A conceptual toolbox for media ecology......Page 87
Part 2: Ecologies of content, code and hardware......Page 90
Chapter 3: Flows of attention and data......Page 92
Economies of attention......Page 93
Understanding content through Big Data......Page 101
Climategate or the scandal that wasn’t......Page 113
Content in communicative capitalism......Page 123
Software and society......Page 129
Free, open and closed......Page 133
Jailbreaking iPhones and Magic Lanterns......Page 141
Drivers, antifeatures and DRM......Page 148
Formats and protocols......Page 154
Crawling the web......Page 157
Conflicts and agency in code and design......Page 163
Chapter 5: Materiality and digital infrastructures......Page 167
Blood coltan and rare earths......Page 169
Virtual? sweatshops......Page 176
Powering digital culture......Page 180
The global trade in e-waste......Page 184
Linear and cyclical models of production......Page 188
Beyond planned obsolescence......Page 193
Externalized harms and feedback......Page 204
Phone story......Page 208
Open Source Ecology......Page 211
Critical instabilities and lines of flight......Page 213
Ecological praxis......Page 216
A biopolitics for the Anthropocene......Page 223
Bibliography......Page 227
Index......Page 250
