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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. 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 *

Digital Media Ecologies

1. Introduction: Re-thinking Media Ecology

Scale and Digital Technoculture

Digital Divisions and Infrastructures

Writing, Complexity and Form

Chapter Outlines



2. Technology, Complexity and Agency

Technological Determinism and Social Constructivism

Agency and Systems Thinking

Assemblages and Affordances

Open Systems and Virtual Geographies

Complexity Theory and Technological Determinism

Networks and Meshworks

Technology and (Post)human Agencies



3. Ecology and Ethics

The Three Ecologies

Rhizomes and Arborescence

Ethics of the Machinic Phylum

Commodities and Commonwealth

A Conceptual Toolbox for Media Ecology



4. Flows of Attention and Data

Economies of Attention

Understanding Content through Big Data

Climategate or the Scandal that Wasn't

Content in Communicative Capitalism



5. Ecologies of Software

Free, Open, and Closed

Jailbreaking iPhones and Magic Lanterns

Drivers, Anti-Features and DRM

Crawling the Web

Conflicts and Agency in Code and Design



6. Materiality and Digital Infrastructures

Blood Coltan and Rare Earths

Virtual? Sweatshops

Powering Digital Culture

The Global Trade in E-Waste

Linear and Cyclical Models of Production

Beyond Planned Obsolescence



7. Enacting Change Across Digital Media Ecologies

Phone Story

Open Source Ecology

Critical Instabilities and Lines of Flight

Feedback, Participation and Hierarchy

Ecological Praxis

A Biopolitics for the Anthropocene



Bibliography

Index