Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment - Paperback

by Nicole Starosielski (Editor), Janet Walker (Editor)

Sustainable Media explores the many ways that media and environment are intertwined from the exploitation of natural and human resources during media production to the installation and disposal of media in the landscape; from people's engagement with environmental issues in film, television, and digital media to the mediating properties of ecologies themselves. Edited by Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker, the assembled chapters expose how the social and representational practices of media culture are necessarily caught up with technologies, infrastructures, and environments.Through in-depth analyses of media theories, practices, and objects including cell phone towers, ecologically-themed video games, Geiger counters for registering radiation, and sound waves traveling through the ocean, contributors question the sustainability of the media we build, exchange, and inhabit and chart emerging alternatives for media ecologies.

Author Biography

Nicole Starosielski is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is author of The Undersea Network, an exploration of the histories, environments, and cultures of transoceanic cable systems, and co-editor, with Lisa Parks, of Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure.

Janet Walker is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also affiliated with the Environmental Media Initiative of the Carsey-Wolf Center. A specialist in documentary film, trauma and memory, and media and environment, her books include Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust and, with Bhaskar Sarkar, Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering.