Mediating Nature

The Role of Technology in Ecological Literacy

Sidney I. Dobrin, Sean Morey, Sidney I. Dobrin, Sean Morey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367025182
• eBook ISBN: 9780429678165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Kommunikationswissenschaften

Mediating Nature considers how technology acts as a mediating device in the construction and circulation of images that inform how we see and know nature. Scholarship in environmental communication has focused almost exclusively on verbal rather than visual rhetoric, and this book engages ecocritical and ecocompositional inquiry to shift focus onto the making of images.

Contributors to this dynamic collection focus their efforts on the intersections of digital media and environmental/ecological thinking. Part of the book's larger argument is that analysis of mediations of nature must develop more critical tools of analysis toward the very mediating technologies that produce such media. That is, to truly understand mediations of nature, one needs to understand the creation and production of those mediations, right down to the algorithms, circuit boards, and power sources that drive mediating technologies.

Ultimately, Mediating Nature contends that ecological literacy and environmental politics are inseparable from digital literacies and visual rhetorics. The book will be of interest to scholars and students working in the fields of Ecocriticism, Ecocomposition, Media Ecology, Visual Rehtoric, and Digital Literacy Studies.

1 Mediating interfaces

Getting in between

Sidney I. Dobrin and Sean Morey

In 2009, editors Sid Dobrin and Sean Morey published the collection Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature in which contributors addressed how images have shaped popular notions of environmentalism, the environment, and more-than-human nature. Ecosee took up the position that despite the rhetorical power of images connected with environmental movements over the past forty years, scholarship in environmental communication has focused almost exclusively on verbal rather than visual rhetoric, as exemplified by M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer’s landmark book Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America. Contributors to Ecosee offered a deeper and fuller understanding of the communicative strategies and power of environmental politics by looking closely at the visual rhetorics involved in photographs, augmented reality applications, television and filmic images, video games, comics, and other forms of image-based media. While the editors maintain that verbal/textual rhetorics still capture the most attention in environmental and ecological studies—particularly within ecocriticism—rapid advances in digital technologies and the ever-growing role of image-based information and data visualization in public communication demand critical consideration of what it means to image nature.

Mediating Nature: The Role of Technology in Ecological Literacy asks the next question in research pertaining to the visual rhetoric of environmental politics and ecological thinking, questioning the very technologies that mediate the construction and circulation of images that inform how we see and know nature. Mediating Nature engages ecocritical and ecocompositional inquiry about the making of image as meaning making. Contributors to this dynamic collection focus their efforts on the intersections of digital media and environmental/ecological thinking, bringing Environmental Humanities into conversation with Digital Humanities, expanding the very notion of what the image of nature might be.

Mediating Nature addresses questions about the technologies used to construct representations of nature, including visual and other sensory representations. Part of the argument that emerges throughout the collection is that the study of media and nature requires the development of critical tools and methodologies for considering the very mediating technologies that produce and circulate representations of nature. That is, to understand mediations of nature, one needs to understand the creation and production of those mediations, right down to the algorithms, circuit boards, and power sources that drive mediating technologies. The need for such understanding is driven not merely by the desire to see the whole picture of mediated nature, as such, but by the fact that such mediations are always already political. As Angela Haas (2008) explains, “just as the rhetoric we compose can never be objective, neither can the technologies we design” (288).

Mediating Nature begins to galvanize and encourage conversations about how such critical tools might unfold beyond the few conversations that have begun to appear in ecocritical and ecocompositional work. For instance, in his article “The Ecocinema Experience,” Scott McDonald (2012) has demonstrated how technologies of film rely upon the bones and tissues of animals, as celluloid film strip is made with collagen, a compound separated from dead animals by boiling these dismembered parts. Similarly, of digital camera technology, Steve Holmes (2017) has argued that the cameras in smartphones that are used to create images of nature need to be disassembled and examined for how their components capture light, process color, and create digital photos in order to understand how the camera mediates the “real” of nature (168–174). Through his analysis of the ways that the San Antonio Zoo mediates encounters with animals through augmented reality exhibits, he argues that this “means that technological black boxes have to be pried apart by cultural studies theorists and exhumed to locate the ways in which mobile media technologies radically restructure experience at multiple affective levels” (174). Thus, questions about mediation target a gamut of kinds of mediating technologies, and though the majority of the discussions in Mediating Nature take up digital imaging technologies, the collection intends to open discussion of mediation by ways of other technologies and materialities as well. That is, the inquiries and methods forwarded in Mediating Nature are intended to generate further questions about old media, as well as new and emerging media, and how those technologies engage sensory perception in addition to the visual.

In addition to the inner workings of mediating technologies, Mediating Nature also addresses the outputs of mediating technologies beyond visual representations. Mediating technologies themselves require humans to make changes to their environments in order to accommodate their technological requirements. For instance, the chemicals used to make and process film are toxic and often end up contaminating the environment. Similarly, the minerals required for the construction of digital devices must be extracted from environments, and as many new media ecologists have identified, those same minerals are dumped as e-waste in mass back into other environments—most often in developing countries—resulting in pollution and causing human health issues. But such concerns extend beyond the immediate, evident material consequences. For example, digital computer code and algorithms create real material effects throughout multiple environments. They require us to alter our buildings, our streets, and the planet in general to accommodate their needs (or our desires that their needs support). As Kevin Slavin (2011) has discussed, companies are gutting hotels and filling the floors with servers in order to be closer to Internet distribution centers. Such proximity allows algorithms (particularly Wall Street trading algorithms) to enact their transactions milliseconds faster. Toward such speed (what Paul Virilio identifies as the dromosphere), we authorize companies to terraform the planet, cutting through the earth to lay cables that more directly traverse the land from city to city, such as the infrastructure being laid by Spread Networks from New York to Chicago. Similarly, as Nicole Starosielski (2015) makes visible in her magnificent book The Undersea Network, the often-veiled global dependence on undersea cable systems reveals the environmental, historical, and cultural impact of that system on media and data circulation. Thus, Mediating Nature considers not only the capture and production of images, but the mediation that occurs in circulating those images as well.

Ultimately, Mediating Nature contends that ecological literacy and environmental politics are inseparable from digital literacies and visual rhetorics. Such a claim also demands consideration beyond the ecocritical and ecocompositional to a broader understanding of such mediations within Environmental Humanities and Digital Humanities, as well. Contributors to this collection push the borders of such thinking in order to forward theoretical considerations and implications of such relationships.

Ecological literacy

To claim that ecological literacy and environmental politics are inseparable from digital literacies and visual rhetorics requires consideration of the very ideas of environmental or ecological literacies, and in turn, digital literacy. We acknowledge the distinction between ecological and environmental literacies in the same way in which ecocriticism has come to identify differences between environmental and ecological, and we do not wish to conflate the two terms as interchangeable, as often happens. Rather, the focus here falls not on the distinctions between environmental and ecological literacies, but on the very idea of literacy as a component of ecocriticism and ecocomposition, on the very idea that we might identify something as an ecological or environmental literacy—or even a digital literacy. That is, the address of mediation in the imaging of nature/environment requires consideration of the very idea of literacy, as well, as the act of mediation is irrevocably bound to literacy. Similarly, histories of literacy often bind literacy with technological development. Reading and writing—a reductive definition of mass literacy—after all, are bound to technologies of writing and circulation (see, for example, Christina Haas, 1996).

Historically, literacy’s value, in part, grows from its opposition to illiteracy, a concept rhetorically imbued with value. The illiterate lacks. Illiterate suggests more than not having the ability to read and write, more than being uneducated; it conveys, as all language does, an ideology of value and individual worth. Describing an individual as being “illiterate” is not merely an identification of lacking a particular skill set—reading and writing, for example—it is a statement of imposed difference. The lack of literacy is conveyed as derogatory, and the label used historically to mark particular populations as Other. As David Barton (1994) has explained, in various moments in history, illiteracy has been characterized as a disease, as a contributor to criminal activity, as an economic burden, and as a factor in unemployment, among other negative attributes. Literacy was employed as a measure of civilization. Those who are literate are understood to be civilized; those not literate deemed uncivilized. Often, such demarcations stood as foundational to colonial enterprise and were employed to silence Indigenous literacies. Sylvia Scribner explains it this way: “Historically, literacy has been a potent tool in maintaining the hegemony of elites and dominant classes in certain societies” (1984: 11). As Annette Vee (2017) explains in Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing Writing, literacy might be better understood in terms of access rather than as a synonym for education (47). Some are granted access, others are not. Vee goes on to show how educational systems are frequently designed to provide that access, but in ways that maintain hegemonic power structures by way of determining what constitutes literacy/education. That is, what education systems promote as knowledge, as literacy, is always already the reinforcement of a particular ideological worldview.

Clearly, this is a reductive overview of the politics of literacy, and this collection focuses on technological mediation, not histories of literacy. However, it is critical that we always be alert to the politics and power invoked in notions of environmental or ecological literacy. Such politics and power may be considered from ideological standpoints, but as this collection shows, the materiality of mediating devices plays a significant role in such literacies. Consider, for example, the ramifications of mediating devices such as medical X-ray machines on bodies. When a patient requires an X-ray, few patients ever ask what kind of X-ray machine the doctor will use to make the images that will inform diagnosis. Few of us are even likely to be aware that there are different kinds of medical imaging devices that can be used to produce X-ray images. Likewise, as one radiologist has explained,¹ there are many companies that make X-ray machines, and each type of machine can provide a different type of image. The same radiologist explains that, like any other manufactured object, there are good X-ray machines and bad X-ray machines. The images one machine makes may be very different from the image of the same object that another machine makes, just as a professional photographer will explain that the image made with one company’s lenses are inherently different from images made with another company’s lenses because the designed grind of the glass is unique to each company’s lenses. The differences in image can direct significantly different diagnosis and intervention. Thus, the variance in imaging contributes to a difference in what is known—literacy—about the object. In this way, then, we see the effect the mediating device plays as never apolitical or innocent. The same should be considered about all mediating devices and the role they play in constructing the ideological positions of literacies. Consider, too, the ways in which variations in ultrasound machines contribute to literacies about women’s bodies and reproduction as a medical process. Or, the ways in which technologies like ultrasound “translate” audio data into visual data to contribute to how we “see” women’s bodies without consideration of the algorithms or circuitry required for such translations. Alternatively, consider how deep space telemetry is translated from radio and other forms of data into visual images that viewers tend to accept as accurate representations of nature, without questioning the politics of the devices themselves or the ideologies supported or refuted through their use. Thus, any invocation of ecological or environmental literacy requires a deeper consideration of the roles mediating technologies play in determining the substance and politics of that claim of literacy. Neither literacy nor technology is ever free of ideological agenda.

Mediation

More often than not—and certainly not unproblematically—mediation in media studies is tied primarily to theories of communication. Prior to the advent of digital media, such theories reduced communicative interaction to distinctions between human-to-human communication and mediated communication, and presumed active engagement with media. Questions of mediation focused primarily on the effects media imposed on communicative situations and, in fact, early theories of mediation did not address media in the act of mediation. However, as Leah A. Lievrouw explains,

In the 1980s and 1990s, the introduction of digital media and information technologies confounded established distinctions between interpersonal and mass communication, and generated another wave of theorizing that brought conversation, symbolic interaction, social constructionism and small group process into accounts of computer-mediated communication, virtuality, online community, and other novel forms of mediated communication.

(2009: 304)

The generation of media scholars that followed these shifts, scholars who emerged native to the digital age, began to examine the complexities of digital mediation in ways that account for the dynamic connections between the digital, the material, and the social that had not previously been accounted for. Thus, communications theorists now identify mediation as the prevailing characteristic of communication, particularly as the use of digital tools evolved from limited, professional settings to ubiquitous personal or domestic uses. That is to say, as Sonia Livingstone explains it, whereas

media and communication studies would analyze the relation between media and politics, say, while in other disciplines they analyze the relation between politics and the environment, or society and the family. But in a heavily mediated world, one cannot analyze the relation between politics and the environment, or society and the family without also recognizing the importance of the media—all these spheres and their intersections have become mediated.

(2009: 2)

Mediation emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as way of addressing connections between media and interpersonal communications within social and cultural contexts (Lievrouw, 2009: 309). The editors of the landmark collection Inter/Media argued for mediation as a key term for emerging communications theories (Gumpert and Cathcart, 1982: 135) and later James A. Anderson and Timothy P. Meyer (1988) would contend that such frameworks focus on emerging media forms. Many of these newer theories of communication, mediation, and emerging technologies focused on the effects the varying technologies had on communicative situations, often focusing on the “impacts” of “new technologies on users’ attitudes, values, behaviors, and perceptions” (Lievrouw, 2009, 309). Similarly, those researchers concerned with media policies began to consider the role of new media in traditional regulatory structures in industry, including things like privacy, decency, and service obligations. Others began to question the role of mediation in technological determinism. Such inquiries also encouraged more interdisciplinary perspectives regarding mediation and communication; theories developed in science and technological studies, for example, necessarily were brought into conversation with communications theories. Such cross-pollinations invigorated new perspectives. For example, science and technology studies provided mediation theories the idea of mutual-shaping, the argument that “society and technology are co-determining and articulated in the on-going engagement between people’s everyday practices and the constraints and affordances of material infrastructure” (Lievrouw, 2009, 310). Similarly, such interdisciplinary influences allowed communications theorists to begin to consider localized and individual subject-focused ideas about meaning and interaction and, later, to be able to make distinctions in mediation between presence and telepresence and the role of interactivity in meaning making. Much of this work focused on the role specific media forms play in communication and information circulation.

Most recently, considerations of mediation have turned from the media to the very act of mediation, influenced by a larger cultural turn and research ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• 1. Mediating interfaces: getting in between
• 2. Ecoplay: the rhetorics of games about nature
• 3. Visualizing ecocritical euphoria in Red Dead Redemption 2
• 4. Stereoscopic rhetorics: model environments, 3D technologies, and decolonizing data collection
• 5. If a tree falls: mediations into and of natural sound
• 6. (Re)placing the rhetoric of scale: ecoliteracy, networked writing, and MEmorial mapping
• 7. Imagining the Eastern Garbage Patch: ocean plastics as a problem of representation and scale
• 8. Meaning in the growing, the harvest, the weaving, the making: Indigenous technologies at Plimoth Plantation’s Wampanoag Homesite
• 9. Translating nature: manipulation of natural landscape in contemporary digital photography
• 10. (Re)coding environmental activism: an examination of Hike Wild Montana
• 11. I See the Body Electrate
• Index