Week 10: Greening the media
Media matters, and media matter also matters.
As shown in Richard Maxwell’s and Toby Miller’s book Greening the Media, information and communication technologies are not ecologically benign. They leave behind plenty of residues — mountains of waste, toxic by-products that affect workers and consumers, and much else — and rearrange the materiality of the world in so many ways.
Project page
Here is where we can share our thoughts (between classes) about the project we’ve decided to take on as a class. The following are some initial ideas arising from our discussion in today’s class.
Project: Seedbomb Burlington
Week 9: Case studies
We are taking this week off from new readings. Instead the class is concentrating on critical analysis assignments and presentations.
Two of these — one on Banksy and the Critical Art Ensemble, the other on Greenpeace and the movement against the Keystone XL pipeline — were presented in class this past week. We are planning to present the remainder in next week’s class. We will also discuss how and what to share online from these analyses, and what form our final applied media projects will take.
Week 8: Culture jamming & tactical media
Adbusters’ 2012 Meme of the Year video
This week we begin looking at some case studies of media uses — specifically, by “tactical media” activists such as “culture jammers” and other “hacktivists.”
Week 7: Theorizing global network society
Marshall McLuhan argued that the world was becoming a “global village.” For the theorists we are examining this week, the world has certainly become global, but it is less a village — which implies a stability and a taken-for-grantedness of “what’s what” and “who’s who” — than it is a tempest or a whirlwind. It is a world of ceaseless flux, flow, and modulation, a world of interconnected networks within which we might not know who we ourselves are, let alone who others are.
About
We live in a different world than did previous generations of humanity. Billions of humans can access a vast ocean of information at their fingertips. Digital media have helped construct a sphere of thickly networked, hypermediate, and interactive communication links that span all levels of human society around the globe.
How do these new media environments affect and interact with the social and biophysical environments that preceded them, and that continue to undergird them?
The concept of “media ecology” is not new. From the medium theories of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Neil Postman to the media ecologies of Felix Guattari, Matthew Fuller, Jussi Parikka, and others; from the “mental environmentalism” of Adbusters and other culture jammers to the “cultural environmentalism” of public domain defenders like James Boyle and Lawrence Lessig — understandings of media as ecologies and of ecology as mediated converge in many ways today.
We are beyond the old debates between the caffeinated cyberoptimism of the digerati and the anti-technology pessimism of the Heideggers, Elluls, and Zerzans. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t precariously poised over the abyss. Ecological calamity stares us in the face, and we need some kind of new “natural contract” with the planet, as philosopher Michel Serres has called for. How can digital media help us get there?
e2mc seeks to explore the relationships between media and ecologies: material, social, and perceptual ecologies within which mediations play an increasingly powerful, complex, and transformative role. It is devoted to the idea of “evolving ecological media culture”: an evolution of a media culture that is cognizant of its multiple ecological contours and connections.
e2mc begins as an experiment, a class exercise for ENVS 204 “Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics,” a senior undergraduate class at the University of Vermont. But it will not limit itself to traditional pedagogical constraints. Where it leads we will see. We invite any and all to share in the adventure.
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