1. How to reconnect media and communication studies to media materialities and "finite media"?
Media and Communications has for a long time recognised the materiality of certain aspects of media, notably media labour, industries and corporate systems. A good example is Curtin and Vanderhoeff's essay on the effects industry's supply chains in Television and New Media (attached) which contains a good survey of writing up to 2015 when it was published. The step from how media are made and how they operate to what they are made of is a relatively small one. It rests on some simple observations: (1) the vast majority of modern media, since about 1920, rely on electricity, which requires generators, which require energy in the form of fossil fuels, nuclear or water (and even in the case of 'renewables' require rare minerals which have to be mined). (2) the installed infrastructure of production, distribution and consumption machinery is made of millions of tonnes of plastics, metals and glasses. All of them require manufacturing, often using multiple chemical and electro-mechanical processes, and transport of sub-components in complex supply chains across the world (3) the cycle of innovation requests and sometimes requires consumers to replace outdated equipment - the old equipment is meant to be recycled, but is frequently only dumped. The whole product life-cycle of infrastructure and devices is an intensive user of power and materials - including the energy requirements of transmission, processing and storage – are significant components of global pollution and carbon emissions. In many instances, these factors are visible in the aesthetics of media content, an area explored in my most recent book, Anecdotal Evidence
Ecocritique is a practice of radical questioning, as essential to the critical armoury as feminism and postcolonialism have become. Like them, it extends beyond judgements about texts with clear ecological themes, demonstrating the significance of ecocriticism for any advanced understanding of cultural forms. Anecdotal method is ecocritical because it focuses on encounters, concentrated ... global.oup.com
2. What is the role of infrastructure costs for digital media?
"Costs" suggests an economic account of infrastructure, which is very important; but there are also environmental costs to launching satelllites, laying cables across oceans and over land, and the provision of cloud and other forms of remote storage. Redundant infrastructure, especially in near-Earth orbits and the deep oceans, is typically simply abandoned. We know little about the effects of space debris on the upper atosphere, or of decaying cable at the immense pressures of the deep sea. Both zones are controlled by extra-govenrmental legal systems with, consequently, little effect on their national and corporate owners. We simply do not know what the environmental costs are, largely because the economic costs are treated as externalities, that is, services provided largely by the environment that do not show up in the financial accounts of the owners. (Even the phrase 'environmental services' is a way of reducing the ecology to an item of accountancy, a fundamentally dishonest or 'ideological' position)
3. You highlight the role of "material" in a world where there are many theorists who speak only of "immaterial". What role does work (and labor exploitation) play in your research?
The same theorists who discuss immateriality of labour are often open to the arguments (associated with Latour among others) that labour is by no means an exclusively human activity. The term 'immaterial' tends to describe work which involves the manipulation of symbols. This work is increasingly undertaken by digital media, as in the case of algorithmic trading in stock exchanges, but also in the use of artificial intelligence for data capture and processing in social media and subscription services. The distinction is legitimate when it distinguishes physical from mental labour, for example in call centres, and is used to indicate changes in workplace organisatuon, discipline and surveillance in digital environments. The link that ecocritique makes apparent here is that the ecology also supplies 'labour' in the form of very material substrates of energy and materials; and that the exploitation of labour does not cease when the labourer dies. Using Marx's thesis of 'dead labour', we can see that the ideas and techniques of earlier generations are congealed into technologies which then form the increasingly important environment of work by human agents. This ancestral environment constitutes an ongoing materialisation and exploitation of labour, even post-mortem. Descriptions of our current situation as an information, cognitive or immaterial economy only over-emphasises the human element of work, to the exclusion of ecological and technological contributors to labour processes. Ecocritical materialism insists that humans cannot be liberated without also liberating technologies and ecologies from the same system that exploits living workers
4. You claim that "contemporary accumulation continues colonialism in the Global South (exocolonialism)". How to relate media finite and colonialism in the Global South?
The most obvious connection between the economic externalisation of the natural world and the Global South is that the human population of the South is equally externalised: the bodies of the poor can be exploited without pay (or with very little) and waste materials (including techno-waste shipped to Ghana and other undefended regions) can be dimped in the form of microplastics, toxic metals and other dangerous debris, into the bodies of the poor and the environments they depend on for food. The vast majority of extractive industries producing for the global electronics market are in developing nations, or worse - in regions torn apart by proxy wars over control of metals, as in the Congo in the notorious case of Coltan (tantalum, an essential component in mobile phones). Much of the so-called 'green technology' being mooted today requires lithium batteries (as in electric cars but also in every laptop, smart watch, phone, camera . . . ). Lithium comes from salt lakes in the Andes: the byproduct of extraction is salt water, which companies dump in the surrounding environment, killing everything. Much comes form land, such as this, kept as reservations when the first indigenous clearances happened under colonisation; indigenous peoples worldwide are being driven from even this marginal land every time a new deposit of valuable metals is discovered. Colonialism was not an event: it is an ongoing catastrophe
5. What does it mean to understand ecological communication as politics?
Ecocritique demands rethinking both politics and communication. We have traditionally thought of communication as an event occurring between people: this is Shannon's mathematical model, now the dominant discourse of the communication industries. May thinkers from McLuhan to Kittler, Flusser to Gitelman and Vismann emphasise the participation of machines in communication. We must now add the participation of materials and energies form the natural world. Communication is not exclusively human: it involves communication with as well as through technologies and environments. Equally politics can no longer be understood as an exclusively human activity. Oceans, atmospheric phenomena, glaciers, jungles, mountains all speak with us, in their ways, to make clear their demands, their requirements for what I take, from Aristotle, to be the concern of politics: how we should live the good life. That "we" must now embrace the non-human world, or their will be no world, and certainly no good life
In this politics as in human politics, we have for too long accepted the principle that a minority has the right (or even the obligation) to speak on behalf of others. I cannot speak on behalf of indigenous peoples. Nor can I speak on behalf of nature. We must rebuild politics so that natural entities can speak for themselves. This in turn requires a remaking of communication so that we can understand what nature is telling us. Not just translating it into data visualisations to persuade other humans - though this is a great and important task - but to create the conditions for dialogue. This in turn requires that we release technologies form their subservience, so that they can mediate between the living, whether human or not.
We cannot simply add ecology to the list of things-to-be-concerned-about: like feminism and decolonialism, ecocritique demands we rethink every aspect of our work
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