E-Book Overview
Media history is millions, even billions, of years old. That is the premise of this pioneering and provocative book, which argues that to adequately understand contemporary media culture we must set out from material realities that precede media themselves—Earth’s history, geological formations, minerals, and energy. And to do so, writes Jussi Parikka, is to confront the profound environmental and social implications of this ubiquitous, but hardly ephemeral, realm of modern-day life.
Exploring the resource depletion and material resourcing required for us to use our devices to live networked lives, Parikka grounds his analysis in Siegfried Zielinski’s widely discussed notion of deep time—but takes it back millennia. Not only are rare earth minerals and many other materials needed to make our digital media machines work, he observes, but used and obsolete media technologies return to the earth as residue of digital culture, contributing to growing layers of toxic waste for future archaeologists to ponder. He shows that these materials must be considered alongside the often dangerous and exploitative labor processes that refine them into the devices underlying our seemingly virtual or immaterial practices.
A Geology of Media demonstrates that the environment does not just surround our media cultural world—it runs through it, enables it, and hosts it in an era of unprecedented climate change. While looking backward to Earth’s distant past, it also looks forward to a more expansive media theory—and, implicitly, media activism—to come.
E-Book Content
A GEOLOGY OF MEDIA
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Electronic Mediations Series Editors: N. Katherine Hayles, Peter Krapp, Rita Raley, and Samuel Weber Founding Editor: Mark Poster
46 A Geology of Media Jussi Parikka 45 World Projects: Global Information before World War I Markus Krajewski 44 Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound Lori Emerson 43 Nauman Reiterated Janet Kraynak 42 Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, Editors 41 Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World Ulises Ali Mejias 40 Summa Technologiae Stanisław Lem 39 Digital Memory and the Archive Wolfgang Ernst 38 How to Do Things with Videogames Ian Bogost 37 Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture Peter Krapp 36 Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture Patrick Crogan 35 Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations Roberto Simanowski (continued on page 207)
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A GEOLOGY OF MEDIA JUSSI PARIKKA
Electronic Mediations, Volume 46
University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London
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A version of chapter 2 was published as The Anthrobscene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Portions of chapter 4 appeared in “Dust and Exhaustion: The Labor of Media Materialism,” CTheory, October 2, 2013, http://www.ctheory.net. The Appendix was previously published as “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method,” Leonardo 45, no. 5 (2012): 424–30. Portions of the book appeared in “Introduction: The Materiality of Media and Waste,” in Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, ed. Jussi Parikka (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Open Humanities Press, 2011), and in “Media Zoology and Waste Management: Animal Energies and Medianatures,” NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies, no. 4 (2013): 527–44. Copyright 2015 by Jussi Parikka All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recordi