scholarly journals Restor(y)ing the Ground: Digital Environmental Media Studies

Author(s):  
Amanda Starling Gould

This article presents a digital environmental media studies (DEMS) framework that shifts the primary focus of digital media study from one grounded in computation to one fully rooted in the earth. DEMS proposes a relational, metabolic ontology wherein popular media theory terms like atmospheric media, elemental media, cyborg, and digital labor are put to new use to call attention to the evolving, inseparable and transformative, material relations between the human, the earth, and the digital network. Motivated by the absence of environmental thinking from both digital theory and popular digital rhetoric, this article counters by making visible the overlooked intersections of media materiality, social reflexivity, and the environment.

Author(s):  
Lisa Bode

On July 14, 2019, a 3-minute 36-second video titled “Keanu Reeves Stops A ROBBERY!” was released on YouTube visual effects (VFX) channel, Corridor. The video’s click-bait title ensured it was quickly shared by users across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Comments on the video suggest that the vast majority of viewers categorised it as fiction. What seemed less universally recognised, though, was that the performer in the clip was not Keanu Reeves himself. It was voice actor and stuntman Reuben Langdon, and his face was digitally replaced with that of Reeves, through the use of an AI generated deepfake, an open access application, Faceswap, and compositing in Adobe After Effects. This article uses Corridor’s deepfake Keanu video (hereafter shorted to CDFK) as a case study which allows the fleshing out of an, as yet, under-researched area of deepfakes: the role of framing contexts in shaping how viewers evaluate, categorise, make sense of and discuss these images. This research draws on visual effects scholarship, celebrity studies, cognitive film studies, social media theory, digital rhetoric, and discourse analysis. It is intended to serve as a starting point of a larger study that will eventually map types of online manipulated media creation on a continuum from the professional to the vernacular, across different platforms, and attending to their aesthetic, ethical, cultural and reception dimensions. The focus on context (platform, creator channel, and comments) also reveals the emergence of an industrial and aesthetic category of visual effects, which I call here “platform VFX,” a key term that provides us with more nuanced frames for illuminating and analysing a range of manipulated media practices as VFX software becomes ever more accessible and lends itself to more vernacular uses, such as we see with various face swap apps


Author(s):  
Pedro Lázaro-Rodríguez

A study of digital news on public libraries is presented through media mapping and a thematic and consumption analysis based on Facebook interactions. A total of 7,629 digital news items published in 2019 have been considered. The media mapping includes the evolution of the volume of news publications, the most prominent media outlets and journalists, and the sections in which most news items are published. For the thematic and consumption analysis, the top 250 news items with the highest number of Facebook interactions are considered, defining 15 thematic categories. The most published topics include: new libraries and spaces, collections, and libraries from a historical perspective. The topics that generate the most interactions are the value of libraries (social, human, and cultural capital), libraries from other countries, and new libraries and spaces. The value and originality of the current study lie in the measurement of the consumption of news and digital media through Facebook interactions. The methods used and results obtained also provide new knowledge for the disciplines of Communication and Media Studies by developing the idea of media mapping for its application to other topics and media in future work, as well as for Librarianship, particularly the information obtained on public libraries. Resumen Se presenta un estudio de noticias digitales sobre bibliotecas públicas en España mediante un mapeo de medios y un análisis temático y de consumo basado en las interacciones en Facebook. Se han considerado 7.629 noticias publicadas en 2019. El mapeo de medios incluye la evolución del volumen de la publicación de noticias, los medios y periodistas más prominentes, y las secciones en las que más se publica. Para el análisis temático y de consumo se consideran las 250 noticias con mayores interacciones en Facebook definiendo 15 categorías temáticas. Los temas sobre los que más se publica son: nuevas bibliotecas y espacios, la colección y las bibliotecas desde la perspectiva de su historia. Los que más interacciones y consumo generan son: el valor de las bibliotecas (capital social, humano y cultural), bibliotecas de otros países y las nuevas bibliotecas y espacios. El valor y la originalidad del estudio consisten en considerar las interacciones en Facebook como medida del consumo de noticias y medios digitales. Los métodos y resultados alcanzados aportan además nuevo conocimiento para dos disciplinas: la comunicación y los medios de comunicación, por el desarrollo de la idea del mapeo de medios que puede aplicarse a otros temas y medios en futuros trabajos; y para la biblioteconomía y la documentación, por la información alcanzada sobre las bibliotecas públicas.


Author(s):  
Thomas Apperley ◽  
Kyle Moore

Haptic media studies emphasize the centrality of touch in the experience of digital media. This article considers how the haptic effect created by relationship between touch, gesture and spatial practice in Pokémon GO cements new possibilities for ambient play and co-presence. The app effectively draws on the genealogies of Nintendo’s handheld Pokémon games, but through the shift to smartphone devices the app creates new forms of ambient play, co-presence and communication that are realized through the publicness of the touch, gesture and comportment which make up the haptic effect of the app. By making the smartphones camera an integral part the game, Pokémon GO suggests the wider relevance of the communicability of feeling and gesture by extending ambient play and co-presence into social media, allowing players to (re)-experience the feeling and touch of Pokémon GO through affective resonance. This suggests that the tactility and touch of the haptic affect are embedded in a matrix of embodied experiences that are revealed through how photography and social media become sites for extending and ambient play.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joerg Fingerhut

This paper argues that the still-emerging paradigm of situated cognition requires a more systematic perspective on media to capture the enculturation of the human mind. By virtue of being media, cultural artifacts present central experiential models of the world for our embodied minds to latch onto. The paper identifies references to external media within embodied, extended, enactive, and predictive approaches to cognition, which remain underdeveloped in terms of the profound impact that media have on our mind. To grasp this impact, I propose an enactive account of media that is based on expansive habits as media-structured, embodied ways of bringing forth meaning and new domains of values. We apply such habits, for instance, when seeing a picture or perceiving a movie. They become established through a process of reciprocal adaptation between media artifacts and organisms and define the range of viable actions within such a media ecology. Within an artifactual habit, we then become attuned to a specific media work (e.g., a TV series, a picture, a text, or even a city) that engages us. Both the plurality of habits and the dynamical adjustments within a habit require a more flexible neural architecture than is addressed by classical cognitive neuroscience. To detail how neural and media processes interlock, I will introduce the concept of neuromediality and discuss radical predictive processing accounts that could contribute to the externalization of the mind by treating media themselves as generative models of the world. After a short primer on general media theory, I discuss media examples in three domains: pictures and moving images; digital media; architecture and the built environment. This discussion demonstrates the need for a new cognitive media theory based on enactive artifactual habits—one that will help us gain perspective on the continuous re-mediation of our mind.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jimi Narotama Mahameruaji ◽  
Lilis Puspitasari ◽  
Evi Rosfiantika ◽  
Detta Rahmawan

This study explores the phenomenon of Vlogger as a new business in the digital media industry in Indonesia. Vlogger refer to social media users who regularly upload a variety of video content with various themes. We used case study to describe and analyze Youtube’s significant role in managing Vlogger communities, and also design support systems to make the communities growth and sustainable. We also explore Vlogger role as Online Influencer. This study is expected to be one of the references related to Vlogger phenomenon in the context of digital media studies in Indonesia.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Oman-Reagan

This paper considers possible futures for human space settlements through the life story and experiences of David Vetter—a child born with severe combined immunodeficiency who became known in popular media as the “bubble boy.” Lynn Margulis imagined the creation of ecosystems and human settlements on another planet could be an act of Gaia reproducing by budding, through ecopoiesis. Thinking with Margulis about humans as holobionts, our species is both constituted by and embedded within communities of organisms and ecologies. As holobionts we may not be able to live outside of these communities and systems or away from Earth, even if we can temporarily survive without them. Placed within an evolutionary framework, techno-capitalist imaginaries of space settlement limit conceptions of planetary reproduction to heteronormative models of ecopoiesis which promote competition as a key driver of evolution instead of cooperation. Technologically mediated survival along with forced reproduction of holobionts within Earth-like systems and could lead to suffering and isolation like David Vetter’s forced survival in a bubble. I propose alternative liberatory modes of conceptualizing and materializing space migration (including queer and decolonized forms of reproduction) which better respect the Earth, its inhabitants, as well as extraterrestrial planets, landscapes, lives, and possibilities. Cite as: Oman-Reagan, Michael P. “Politics of Planetary Reproduction and the Children of Other Worlds.” Futures. (Forthcoming, 2019)


2001 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob Hanke

Abstract: This article presents a case study of a televised encounter between representatives of the fields of television, journalism, and academic media study. The article moves from a description of what was, and could be, said during Moses Znaimer's A Colloquium on TVTV to an analysis of invisible fields of cultural production and their effects. I argue that Pierre Bourdieu's work on television offers a valuable sociological perspective on television, intellectuals, and public knowledge, but that Canadian Learning Television's use of media studies may have paradoxical effects. Unless media scholars reflect upon these effects and begin to negotiate the terms and conditions of our appearance on television, our involvement may not increase the power of our analysis. Résumé: Cet article présente une étude de cas sur une rencontre télévisée entre des représentants des mondes télévisuel, journalistique, et académique. L'article part d'une description de ce que ceux-ci ont dit ainsi que de ce qu'ils auraient pu dire lors du Colloque sur TVTV de Moses Znaimer, pour aboutir à l'analyse de champs invisibles de production culturelle et de leurs effets. Je soutiens que le travail de Pierre Bourdieu sur la télévision offre une perspective sociologique de valeur sur la télévision, les intellectuels, et le savoir public, mais que l'utilisation d'études médiatiques par Canadian Learning Television («La Télévision d'enseignement canadienne») pourrait avoir des conséquences paradoxales. À moins de négocier les modalités de nospassages à la télévision, nous les chercheurs médiatiques aurons de la difficulté à accroître le pouvoir de nos analyses.


Author(s):  
Suzette Worden

The Anthropocene is being suggested as a new geological age replacing the Holocene and is a description of a time interval where significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activity. Artists interested in the earth sciences are using digital media to provide audiences with ways of understanding the issues highlighted in discussions about the Anthropocene. These artists are harnessing data through visualisation and sonification, facilitating audience participation, and are often working in art-science collaborations. These activities demonstrate a transdisciplinary approach that is necessary for confronting the world's most pressing problems, such as climate change. After a discussion of the opportunities provided by visualisation technologies and an overview of the Anthropocene, this chapter explores the following interrelated themes through examples of creative works: (1) nanoscale, (2) geology and deep time, (3) climate, weather, and the atmosphere, (4) extreme places – beyond wilderness, and (5) curatorial practice as environmental care.


Author(s):  
Andréa Belliger ◽  
David John Krieger

In the network society and the age of media convergence, media production can no longer be isolated into channels, formats, technologies, and organizations. Media Studies is facing the challenge to reconceptualize its foundations. It could therefore be claimed that new media are the last media. In the case of digital versus analog, there is no continuity between new media and old media. A new and promising proposal has come from German scholars who attempt the precarious balance between media theory and a general theory of mediation based on Actor-Network Theory. Under the title of Actor-Media Theory (Akteur-Medien-Theorie) these thinkers attempt to reformulate the program of Media Studies beyond assumptions of social or technical determinism. Replacing Actor-Network Theory with Actor-Media Theory raises the question of whether exchanging the concept of “network” for the concept of “media” is methodologically and theoretically advantageous.


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