Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies

Cubitt, Sean. 2016. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822362920 [Book]

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Abstract or 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.

Item Type:

Book

Keywords:

Cultural Studies, Environmental Studies, Media Studies, Media Technologies

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Date:

December 2016

Item ID:

20046

Date Deposited:

17 Mar 2017 14:31

Last Modified:

01 Mar 2021 16:36

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/20046

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