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Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies


Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies

Paperback by Cubitt, Sean

Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies

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£18.39

ISBN:
9780822362920
Publication Date:
3 Jan 2017
Language:
English
Publisher:
Duke University Press
Pages:
256 pages
Format:
Paperback
For delivery:
Estimated despatch 27 - 29 May 2024
Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies

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.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction. Eco-mediation 1 1. Energy 13 2. Matter 63 3. Eco-political Aesthetics 151 4. Ecological Communication as Politics 169 Coda on Saturn 193 References 201 Index 237

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