Our digital world is often described using terms such as immateriality and virtuality. The discourse of cloud computing is the latest in a long line of nebulous, dematerialising tropes which have come to dominate how we think about information and communication technologies. Digital Media Ecologies argues that such rhetoric is highly misleading, and that engaging with the key cultural, agential, ethical and political impacts of contemporary media requires that we do not just engage with the surface level of content encountered by the end users of digital media, but that we must additionally consider the affordances of software and hardware. Whilst numerous existing approaches explore content, software and hardware individually, Digital Media Ecologies provides a critical intervention by insisting that addressing contemporary technoculture requires a synthetic approach that traverses these three registers. Digital Media Ecologies re-envisions the methodological approach of media ecology to go beyond the metaphor of a symbolic information environment that exists alongside a material world of tantalum, turtles and tornados. It illustrates the social, cultural, political and environmental impacts of contemporary media assemblages through examples that include mining conflict-sustaining minerals, climate change blogging, iOS jailbreaking, and the ecological footprint of contemporary computing infrastructures. Alongside foregrounding the deleterious social and environmental impacts of digital technologies, the book considers numerous ways that these issues are being tackled by a heterogeneous array of activists, academics, hackers, scientists and citizens using the same technological assemblages that ostensibly cause these problems.

Emerging Digital Media Ecologies: The Concept of Medialogy investigates the profound ways in which digital media reshapes our cultural, socio-technological, political, and natural landscapes. Through interdisciplinary empirical and creative case studies, the book defines and illuminates the nuances of medialogy, emphasising the often-underestimated impact of emerging technologies across interactive education, data gathering, visual-data representations, and creative practice. It explores the intersection of the natural and technological worlds, contextualising our use of natural resources against climate change and sustainable economies. Divided into two parts, the book delves into the theoretical underpinnings of digital media ecologies and their practical applications. Part 1 traces the evolution of media technologies, examining their environmental impact and the foundational approaches to understanding media’s complex interconnections. Part 2 focuses on contemporary issues such as hyperpersonalised media, digital literacy, and the transformative power of Indigenous media narratives. Additionally, the monograph explores the revolutionary role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and large language models like ChatGPT-4o and those that follow in shaping our digital future. It investigates how AI transforms creative practices, data processing, and communication, contributing to the formation of new media ecologies. The ethical implications, commodification, identity formation, and the impact of AI-driven technologies on everyday life are critically examined, offering insights into the future of human–technology interactions. This book is a crucial reference for scholars, practitioners, and students in digital humanities, media studies, environmental humanities, and anyone interested in the cultural implications of emerging digital technologies and their impact on our environment and society.

This book explores the media ecologies of literature – the ways in which a literary text is interwoven in its material, technical, performative, praxeological, affective, and discursive network and which determine how it is experienced and interpreted. Through novel approaches to the complex, contingent and interdependent environments of literature, this volume demonstrates how questions about the mediality of literature – particularly in the wake of digitization – shed a new light on our understanding of textuality, reading, platforms and reception processes. By drawing on recent developments in advanced media theory, Media Ecologies of Literature emphasizes the productivity of innovative re-conceptualizations of literature as a medium in its own right. In an intentionally wide historical scope, the essays engage with literary texts from the Romantic to the contemporary period, from Charlotte Smith and Oscar Wilde to A. L. Kennedy and Mark Z. Danielewski, from the traditionally printed novel to audiobooks and reading apps.

In this study, Baltruschat calls attention to dramatic changes in worldwide media production. Her work provides new insights into industry re-organization, digital media, and audience interactivity as pivotal relationships are redrawn along the entire value chain of production, distribution, and consumption. Based on an international study, she details how cultural agents now negotiate a media landscape through collaborative ventures, co-productions and format franchising. These varied collaborations define the new global media economy and affect a shift across the entire field of cultural production. Through detailing the intricacies of globally networked production ecologies, Baltruschat elucidates the shifting power relations in media production, especially in regards to creative labor and trade of intellectual properties. In the new global economy, "content" has become the "new currency." As a result, relational dynamics between cultural agents emerge as key forces in shaping worldwide cultural production, now increasingly characterized by flexible production and consumption. The blurring of lines in international media developments require new parameters, which define creativity and intellectual property in relation to interactive audiences and collaboratively produced content. Baltruschat clearly maps and defines these new dynamics and provides solutions as to how creative labor constellations can advance and enrich the new media economy. This is especially pertinent as global film and TV production does not necessarily result in greater media diversity. On the contrary, interdependencies in policy regimes, prioritization of certain genres, and branded entertainment epitomize how current networked ecologies reflect broader trends in cultural and economic globalization.

Digital Contagions is the first book to offer a comprehensive and critical analysis of the culture and history of the computer virus phenomenon. The book maps the anomalies of network culture from the angles of security concerns, the biopolitics of digital systems, and the aspirations for artificial life in software. The genealogy of network culture is approached from the standpoint of accidents that are endemic to the digital media ecology. Viruses, worms, and other software objects are not, then, seen merely from the perspective of anti-virus research or practical security concerns, but as cultural and historical expressions that traverse a non-linear field from fiction to technical media, from net art to politics of software. Jussi Parikka mobilizes an extensive array of source materials and intertwines them with an inventive new materialist cultural analysis. Digital Contagions draws from the cultural theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Friedrich Kittler, and Paul Virilio, among others, and offers novel insights into historical media analysis.

"This volume presents sixteen studies about the complex interactions between, art, media, science and technology."--Back cover.

"This book provides perspectives on new approaches to learning theory and practice in increasingly mobile, immersive environments, offering both theory and practice"--Provided by publisher.

"This book offers a prophetic vision of art in a digital future. Expanding upon the emerging artistic prospects made possible by technology, it explores the new directions in art that have arisen between the planes of science, technological development and cultural expression. Focusing upon the epochal shift from pre- to post-modernism, the author examines the interrelations between digital age art and Jewish consciousness."--BOOK JACKET.