Digital Media Ecologies

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Our digital world is often characterized by terms like immateriality and virtuality, with cloud computing being the latest in a series of dematerializing concepts that shape our understanding of information and communication technologies. This work critiques such rhetoric as misleading, emphasizing that to grasp the cultural, ethical, and political impacts of contemporary media, we must look beyond the surface content encountered by users. It argues for a comprehensive analysis that includes the affordances of both software and hardware. While many approaches focus on content, software, or hardware in isolation, this perspective advocates for a synthetic approach that integrates all three elements. The text redefines media ecology methodology, moving past the metaphor of a symbolic information environment that coexists with a material world. It highlights the social, cultural, political, and environmental consequences of modern media through examples such as mining for conflict minerals, climate change blogging, iOS jailbreaking, and the ecological impact of computing infrastructures. In addition to exposing the harmful effects of digital technologies, it explores how a diverse group of activists, academics, hackers, scientists, and citizens are addressing these challenges using the same technologies that contribute to them.