Media and the Ecological Crisis PDF Download

Author: Richard Maxwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134627297
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Media and the Ecological Crisis is a collaborative work of interdisciplinary writers engaged in mapping, understanding and addressing the complex contribution of media to the current ecological crisis. The book is informed by a fusion of scholarly, practitioner, and activist interests to inform, educate, and advocate for real, environmentally sound changes in design, policy, industrial, and consumer practices. Aligned with an emerging area of scholarship devoted to identifying and analysing the material physical links of media technologies, cultural production, and environment, it contributes to the project of greening media studies by raising awareness of media technology’s concrete environmental effects.

Author: Alenda Y. Chang
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145296226X
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
A potent new book examines the overlap between our ecological crisis and video games Video games may be fun and immersive diversions from daily life, but can they go beyond the realm of entertainment to do something serious—like help us save the planet? As one of the signature issues of the twenty-first century, ecological deterioration is seemingly everywhere, but it is rarely considered via the realm of interactive digital play. In Playing Nature, Alenda Y. Chang offers groundbreaking methods for exploring this vital overlap. Arguing that games need to be understood as part of a cultural response to the growing ecological crisis, Playing Nature seeds conversations around key environmental science concepts and terms. Chang suggests several ways to rethink existing game taxonomies and theories of agency while revealing surprising fundamental similarities between game play and scientific work. Gracefully reconciling new media theory with environmental criticism, Playing Nature examines an exciting range of games and related art forms, including historical and contemporary analog and digital games, alternate- and augmented-reality games, museum exhibitions, film, and science fiction. Chang puts her surprising ideas into conversation with leading media studies and environmental humanities scholars like Alexander Galloway, Donna Haraway, and Ursula Heise, ultimately exploring manifold ecological futures—not all of them dystopian.

Author: Nicole Starosielski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317745825
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
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.

Author: Richard Maxwell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199939284
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
You will never look at your cell phone, TV, or computer the same way after reading this book. Greening the Media not only reveals the dirty secrets that hide inside our favorite electronic devices; it also takes apart the myths that have pushed these gadgets to the center of our lives. Marshaling an astounding array of economic, environmental, and historical facts, Maxwell and Miller debunk the idea that information and communication technologies (ICT) are clean and ecologically benign. The authors show how the physical reality of making, consuming, and discarding them is rife with toxic ingredients, poisonous working conditions, and hazardous waste. But all is not lost. As the title suggests, Maxwell and Miller dwell critically on these environmental problems in order to think creatively about ways to solve them. They enlist a range of potential allies in this effort to foster greener media--from green consumers to green citizens, with stops along the way to hear from exploited workers, celebrities, and assorted bureaucrats. Ultimately, Greening the Media rethinks the status of print and screen technologies, opening new lines of historical and social analysis of ICT, consumer electronics, and media production.

Author: PIETARI. KAAPA
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367459840
Category : Environmental management
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
In recent years the widely held misconception of the media as an 'ephemeral' industry has been challenged by research on the industry's significant material footprint. Despite this material turn, no systematic study of this sector has been conducted in ways that considers the role of the media industries as consumers and users of a range of natural resources. Filling this gap, Environmental Management of the Media discusses the environmental management of the media industries in the UK and the Nordic countries. These Nordic countries, both as a set of small nations and as a regional constellation, are frequently perceived as some of the 'greenest' in the world, yet, not only is the footprint of the media industries practically ignored in academic research, but the very real stakes of the industries' global impact are not comprehensively understood. Here, the author focuses on four key areas for investigating the material impact of Nordic media: (1) resources used for production and dissemination; (2) regulation of the media; (3) organizational management; and (4) labour practices. By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective that combines ecocritical analysis with interrogation of the political economy of the creative industries, Kääpä argues that taking the industries to task on their environmental footprint is a multilevel resource and organizational management issue that must be addressed more effectively in contemporary media studies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of media, communication and environmental studies.

Author: Stephen Rust
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317670574
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Ecomedia: Key Issues is a comprehensive textbook introducing the burgeoning field of ecomedia studies to provide an overview of the interface between environmental issues and the media globally. Linking the world of media production, distribution, and consumption to environmental understandings, the book addresses ecological meanings encoded in media texts, the environmental impacts of media production, and the relationships between media and cultural perceptions of the environment. Each chapter introduces a distinct type of media, addressing it in a theoretical overview before engaging with specific case studies. In this way, the book provides an accessible introduction to each form of media as well as a sophisticated analysis of relevant cases. The book includes contributions from a combination of new voices and well-established media scholars from across the globe who examine the basic concepts and key issues of ecomedia studies. The concepts of "frames," "flow", and "convergence" structure a dynamic collection divided into three parts. The first part addresses traditional visual texts, such as comics, photography, and film. The second part of the book addresses traditional broadcast media, such as radio, and television, and the third part looks at new media, such as advertising, video games, the internet, and digital renderings of scientific data. In its breadth and scope, Ecomedia: Key Issues presents a unique survey of rich scholarship at the confluence of Media Studies and Environmental Studies. The book is written in an engaging and accessible style, with each chapter including case studies, discussion questions and suggestions for further reading.

Author: Jacob Smith
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520961498
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The negative environmental effects of media culture are not often acknowledged: the fuel required to keep huge server farms in operation, landfills full of high tech junk, and the extraction of rare minerals for devices reliant on them are just some of the hidden costs of the contemporary mediascape. Eco-Sonic Media brings an ecological critique to the history of sound media technologies in order to amplify the environmental undertones in sound studies and turn up the audio in discussions of greening the media. By looking at early and neglected forms of sound technology, Jacob Smith seeks to create a revisionist, ecologically aware history of sound media. Delving into the history of pre-electronic media like hand-cranked gramophones, comparatively eco-friendly media artifacts such as the shellac discs that preceded the use of petroleum-based vinyl, early forms of portable technology like divining rods, and even the use of songbirds as domestic music machines, Smith builds a scaffolding of historical case studies to demonstrate how "green media archaeology" can make sound studies vibrate at an ecological frequency while opening the ears of eco-criticism. Throughout this eye-opening and timely book he makes readers more aware of the costs and consequences of their personal media consumption by prompting comparisons with non-digital, non-electronic technologies and by offering different ways in which sound media can become eco-sonic media. In the process, he forges interdisciplinary connections, opens new avenues of research, and poses fresh theoretical questions for scholars and students of media, sound studies, and contemporary environmental history.

Author: Sean Cubitt
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822373475
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
While digital media give us the ability to communicate with and know the world, their use comes at the expense of an immense ecological footprint and environmental degradation. In Finite Media Sean Cubitt offers a large-scale rethinking of theories of mediation by examining the environmental and human toll exacted by mining and the manufacture, use, and disposal of millions of phones, computers, and other devices. The way out is through an eco-political media aesthetics, in which people use media to shift their relationship to the environment and where public goods and spaces are available to all. Cubitt demonstrates this through case studies ranging from the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang to an image of Saturn taken during NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission, suggesting that affective responses to images may generate a populist environmental politics that demands better ways of living and being. Only by reorienting our use of media, Cubitt contends, can we overcome the failures of political elites and the ravages of capital.

Author: Libby Lester
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745644015
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Drawing on a range of international examples, Libby Lester invites readers to develop a nuanced understanding of changing media practices and dynamics by connecting local, national and global environmental issues, journalistic practices and news sources, public relations and protests, and the symbolic and strategic circulation of meanings in the public sphere.

Author: Robert A. Hackett
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317362004
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Journalism and Climate Crisis: Public Engagement, Media Alternatives recognizes that climate change is more than an environmental crisis. It is also a question of political and communicative capacity. This book enquires into which approaches to journalism, as a particularly important form of public communication, can best enable humanity to productively address climate crisis. The book combines selective overviews of previous research, normative enquiry (what should journalism be doing?) and original empirical case studies of environmental communication and media coverage in Australia and Canada. Bringing together perspectives from the fields of environmental communication and journalism studies, the authors argue for forms of journalism that can encourage public engagement and mobilization to challenge the powerful interests vested in a high-carbon economy – ‘facilitative’ and ‘radical’ roles particularly well-suited to alternative media and alternative journalism. Ultimately, the book argues for a fundamental rethinking of relationships between journalism, publics, democracy and climate crisis. This book will interest researchers, students and activists in environmental politics, social movements and the media.