1st Edition

Sustainable Media Critical Approaches to Media and Environment

Edited By Nicole Starosielski, Janet Walker Copyright 2016
    310 Pages 25 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    310 Pages 25 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Sustainable Media explores the many ways that media and environment are intertwined from the exploitation of natural and human resources during media production to the installation and disposal of media in the landscape; from people’s engagement with environmental issues in film, television, and digital media to the mediating properties of ecologies themselves. Edited by Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker, the assembled chapters expose how the social and representational practices of media culture are necessarily caught up with technologies, infrastructures, and environments.Through in-depth analyses of media theories, practices, and objects including cell phone towers, ecologically-themed video games, Geiger counters for registering radiation, and sound waves traveling through the ocean, contributors question the sustainability of the media we build, exchange, and inhabit and chart emerging alternatives for media ecologies.

    Introduction

    Janet Walker and Nicole Starosielski, Introduction: Sustainable Media

    Part One: Resource Media

    1. Hunter Vaughan, 500,000 Kilowatts of Stardust: An Eco-Materialist Reframing of Singin’ in the Rain

    2. Nicole Starosielski, Pipeline Ecologies: Rural Entanglements of Fiber-Optic Cables

    3. Shane Brennan, Making Data Sustainable: Backup Culture and Risk Perception

    4. Colin Milburn, "Ain’t No Way Offa This Train:" Final Fantasy VII and the Pwning of Environmental Crisis

    Part Two: Social Ecologies, Mediating Environments

    5. Rahul Mukherjee, Mediating Infrastructures: (Im)Mobile Toxicity and Cell Antenna Publics

    6. Minori Ishida, The Lack of Media: The Invisible Domain post 3.11

    7. John Shiga, Ping and the Material Meanings of Ocean Sound

    8. Amy Rust, "Going the Distance:" Steadicam’s Ecological Aesthetic

    Part Three: (Un)sustainable Materialities

    9. Sean Cubitt, Ecologies of Fabrication

    10. Jennifer Gabrys, Re-thingifying the Internet of Things

    11. Jussi Parikka, So-called Nature: Friedrich Kittler and Ecological Media Materialism

    Part Four: Scaling, Modeling, Coupling

    12. Alenda Y. Chang, Think Microscopically, Act Galactically? The Science of Scale in Video Games

    13. Bishnupriya Ghosh, Toward Symbiosis: Human-viral Futures in the "Molecular Movies"

    14. Erica Robles-Anderson and Max Liboiron, Coupling Complexity: Ecology, Cybernetics, and Non-Representational Modes of Environmental Action

    15. Peter Krapp, The Invisible Axis: From Polar Media to Planetary Networks

    Biography

    Nicole Starosielski is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is author of The Undersea Network, an exploration of the histories, environments, and cultures of transoceanic cable systems, and co-editor, with Lisa Parks, of Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure.

    Janet Walker is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also affiliated with the Environmental Media Initiative of the Carsey-Wolf Center. A specialist in documentary film, trauma and memory, and media and environment, her books include Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust and, with Bhaskar Sarkar, Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering.