Digital Media Ecologies: Entanglements Of Content, Code And Hardware

Description

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. 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