[Commlist] New Book: Digital Media Ecologies

Digital Media Ecologies: Entanglements of Content, Code and Hardware 
<https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/digital-media-ecologies-9781501349249/>.
By Sy Taffel

Please consider ordering a copy for your library! You can also use the 
code GLR MP9 for a 35% discount on the list price.

“/Digital media/, you say? Taffel's fantastic book responds: you 
probably meant this multi-scalar entangled reality of energy and matter, 
software and hardware, humans and technology, all in complex feedback 
loops that we need to map and unravel if we want to dig ourselves out of 
this planetary scale mediated mess we got ourselves – and our companion 
species – in!” –  Jussi Parikka, professor of Technological Culture & 
Aesthetics, University of Southampton, UK

“Ecology is not just a metaphor in Sy Taffel's powerfully optimistic 
take on media ecology. Media are ecological, looting resources, dumping 
waste, and at the same time connecting us to our world. Taffel proposes 
that we stand at a decisive moment between the triumph of network 
capital and new ways of moving from consumerism to commonwealth. In a 
powerful series of case studies, Taffel shows how human mediation can 
stop being the problem and become the solution.” –  Sean Cubitt, 
Professor of Film and Television, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

“Traversing complex scales of entanglement, Sy Taffel's rich account of 
media ecologies provides a much needed update on the materiality of 
media networks. Registering astutely the crises of our times, Taffel 
asks how we might reorient our imaginaries, practices and economies in 
ways that don't submit to the dystopian horrors of the Anthropocene. 
Theoretically sophisticated and succinctly written, /Digital Media 
Ecologies/ is a most welcome addition to the nascent field of research 
on environmental media and new materialism.” –  Ned Rossiter, Professor 
of Communication, Western Sydney University, Australia

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.


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