I’ve been told, anecdotally, that a classic question asked after papers in geographical conferences is ‘where’s the geography in this?’ As an editor coming to this collection from a slightly different disciplinary context than my co-editors, and who has worked in media studies departments for the best part of a decade, I expected my central question when reading through chapters might be ‘where’s the media in this?’ or – perhaps more pointedly – ‘where’s the media studies in this?’ In part my (erroneous) assumption stemmed from defensiveness at the way media studies has often been maligned (by the mass media) or overlooked (in academia), dynamics that have been more visible as digital media have become an object of study for an expanding range of disciplines, but frameworks from media studies have not. I was excited, therefore, to read chapters written within a paradigm of more-than-human geography drawing upon heterogeneous strands of media scholarship – from software to social movement media studies – as well as work from the digital humanities that was informed by insights from more-than-human geographies. This afterword, then, is not an attempt to redress a lack of digital ecologies research that draws upon media studies, but to reflect on some of the connections made across chapters that I found especially productive, in order to deepen these connections and ask how they might be suggestive of future research directions.

This book’s account of digital ecologies is developed iteratively, through chapters that coalesce around specific media technologies: apps, camera traps, livestreams, sensors, social media platforms, databases, software, digitised sound recordings, and online images. Yet, even as digital technologies assume a central role throughout the book, the account of mediation offered by the collection exceeds narrow conceptions of ‘the digital’. Instead, the processes traced by authors resonate with influential theory that has expanded how media are conceived, such as scholarship that has articulated non-human animals and elements as themselves being media;¹ research examining how the affordances of media emerge relationally and through practice;² and work situating digital media in centuries-old historical and material contexts.³

The expansion of ecological thinking to conceptualise digital media has not, however, been without criticism. As Erich Hörl argues in the introduction of General Ecology:

For Hörl, the conceptual expansion of ecology is ambivalent because it comes at the same time as the term’s association with ‘nature’ is contracting. Ecology might retain a connection with so-called natural environments in the life sciences, or perhaps in lay uses of the term. However, in many branches of the humanities and social sciences, the interventions made by more-than-human thought have frayed any neat boundaries between nature and culture that would enable ‘ecology’ to be reduced to the former. Digital technologies play an important role in these discussions. At the heart of Hörl’s arguments, for instance, is concern that the concept of ecology has: ‘begun to switch sides within the nature/technics divide, undoing the sutures that bound it to nature’.⁵ These arguments have high stakes; if anything can be understood in ecological terms, but what ecology means has shifted away from any association with ‘nature’ and towards ‘cybernetic paradigms of regulation and control’, then there is no domain that can be defended against technocratic manipulation and intervention.⁶ Hörl’s contention, drawing on Frédéric Neyrat, is that a means must be found to ‘reintroduce the gap into the bad immanence of the global technological system’: a gap that Neyrat suggests can be found by reclaiming ‘nature’ as a discrete realm.⁷

While critiques of ecology’s expansion and evolution are important, it is important to remember that the unsettling of nature/culture divisions has often been spearheaded by feminist, postcolonial scholarship. For many thinkers, recasting the world in terms of naturecultures offers a means of contesting anthropocentric modes of praxis that place ‘humanity’ as removed from (and holding dominion over) anything rendered ‘nature’.⁸ When categories such as ‘nature’ and the ‘human’ have been subject to such enduring histories of violence, is it desirable – or even possible – to reinstall an analytic or ethical separation between a human realm of (digital) media and a ‘nature’ entirely populated by those deemed non-human?⁹ The chapters in Digital Ecologies go to the heart of these debates, grappling with, on the one hand, the analytic and ethical value of recognising digitally enabled more-than-human entanglements and, on the other hand, laying bare the violence that can be materialised through socio-technical infrastructures, mediated encounters, and emerging forms of governance.

One of the reasons I found the chapters in this book so generative is the routes they offered into navigating these (sometimes fraught) academic debates, precisely through the way they weave different conceptual traditions together. Below I reflect on two areas where I believe especially fruitful disciplinary relationships are emerging, focusing first on the ethics of digital ecologies before moving on to broader discussion of the theoretical implications of how these ecologies are conceived.

Mediating ethics

As elaborated upon in the Introduction, this book’s editors have understood digital ecologies as an epistemological framework, or ‘mode of investigation’, which traces mediated entanglements that inform more-than-human worlds. This framework is oriented around a series of questions that are intended to reveal the socio-technical relations, technologies, and infrastructures that mediate life in particular contexts, by asking (among other questions) which material relations constitute digital ecologies, who is rendered encounterable by these relations and to what ends, and what regimes of governance emerge from these ecologies? Individual chapters bring the stakes of these questions into focus. What happens, for instance, when the ‘byproductive’ labour of chickens is monetised through livestreams (Oliver), fisheries and forests become subject to continuous monitoring with digital sensors (Hartman Davies and Lorimer; Gabrys), or when pangolins, tigers, and elephants are enrolled into gamified practices of self-quantification (Adams, Sandbrook, and Tait)?

As underlined throughout each chapter, and as some of the book’s editors have put it elsewhere, one of the book’s aspirations is to resist simply tracing novel more-than-human entanglements and to instead ask ‘what comes after digital entanglement?’¹⁰ What this means in practice is moving beyond the description of entanglements between non-human animals, environmental actors, and media technologies, to instead centralise questions about the ethics and epistemology of these unfolding (or perhaps enfolding) relationships. The ecological approach advocated throughout this collection, therefore, might use the terminology and frameworks associated with more-than-human thought but combine this approach with an explicitly critical edge.

For example, many of the processes described in this book – from trap-cams that foster attentiveness and affection toward lobsters (Remme) to databases of heritage seeds (Doyle and Dow) – rely on carbon-intensive infrastructures and that wreak ecological damage when extracted from the earth. These tensions are epitomised by Hannah Hunter, Sandra Jasper, and Jonathan Prior, in the context of digital sound archives of endangered species, where the authors point out that:

Shellac, in particular, underlines how materials important in conserving futures for some non-human animals are constituted by the bodies of other creatures.¹¹ Such observations offer a reminder that, in Thom van Dooren’s words, ‘care that is practised at the dull edge of extinction is often intimately and inextricably entangled with various forms of violence’.¹² What chapters from this book articulate, however, is the pivotal role of media in fostering regimes of violent-care or instrumentalising affective relations.

William M. Adams, Chris Sandbrook, and Emma Tait, for instance, draw novel connections between game studies, sociological work on gamification, and animal geographies to trace ways that human self-quantification practices are entangled with the extraction of data from non-human animals in exercise apps. Catherine Oliver’s important intervention, likewise, traces complex relationships between the lives of livestreamed chickens and the affective labour of audiences who intervene in these lives through typing commands that drop treats into their coop. What is especially valuable in theorising these relations in terms of byproductive labour is the reminder to situate encounters in relation to the political economy of digital media. Moving forward, these lines of enquiry open up important potentials for grasping how the surplus (encounter-)value derived from relations with non-human beings might intersect with unfolding discussions about the imbrication of digital infrastructures with informational capitalism.¹³

Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme, in contrast, articulates how the role of mediation in lobster conservation ‘inverts’ the relationship between care and instrumentalisation. As traced in the chapter, a growing body of scholarship has foregrounded how knowledge generated through caring for non-human animals can be used for future purposes of instrumentalisation and control. Remme, however, describes how an experimental lobster trap-cam – which intervened in and instrumentalised lobster behaviour to attract audiences – was integral in generating resources to replace modern lobster traps (which often become ‘ghost traps’ that continue to kill sea life if lost at sea) with traditional wooden alternatives. Here, he suggests: ‘instrumentalisation and commodification was central for fostering care and affective encounters with lobsters. No funding, no camera, no publicity, no wooden traps’.

More broadly, many of the chapters in the book point to the way that conservation work is increasingly bound up with the surveillance, datafication, and capture of environments, or what a number of scholars term ‘logics of environmentality’ or ‘eco-logics’.¹⁴ These concerns are brought to the fore – and again complicated – in Jennifer Gabrys’s account of the rise of smart forests (Chapter 9) and Oscar Hartman Davies and Jamie Lorimer’s analysis of how surveillance is not just something that happens to non-human animals, as ‘oceanic surveillance is also performed with animals, as part of a “wired wilderness”’ (Chapter 5). Both chapters post important questions about the metamorphosis of surveillance away from neo-colonial national park models, where boundaries are violently policed through static technologies and patrols, to more dispersed modes of governance that enrol non-human beings into a constantly shifting surveillance apparatus.¹⁵ A critical question, then, is how the ethical implications of this metamorphosis in the relationship between violence, encounter, and mediation will unfold as these technologies become ever more pervasive.

In sum, therefore, many chapters in Digital Ecologies reveal the role of media in ecological reformulation and instrumentalisation, elucidating how a focus on media can complicate more-than-human narratives of care as emerging through encounter. Other chapters in the book, however, offer a slightly different focus: revealing promise as well as perils in digitisation, through making generative connections with slightly different strands of media studies research.

Mediated ecologies versus media ecologies

As touched on in the introduction to this afterword, I have often been worried at the lack of meaningful dialogue between disciplines that take ‘the digital’ as their object of study. A number of chapters in this book, however, made me excited at seeing potential for further dialogue between fields such as more-than-human geographies, media sociology, and social movement studies, which can offer one another informative empirical insights, theoretical coordinates, and methodologies.

Chapters 6 and 7, for instance, foreground the value of digital methods in understanding how awareness – and mobilisation – can emerge in relation to environmental crisis, making insightful contributions to scholarship on the affective circulation and meaning-making that ground online narratives.¹⁶ These chapters’ approaches, however, are different in emphasis: while Jonathan W.Y. Gray, Liliana Bounegru, and Gabriele Colombo (Chapter 6) chart how concern about forest fires was engaged with – akin to a form of front-stage ‘connective action’ – Jess McLean and Lara Newman’s (Chapter 7) account of climate strikes grounds online activities in the place-based ‘back-stage’ collective action of youth climate activists.¹⁷ In doing so, both chapters speak in productive ways to social movement media studies, which has emphasised the value of framing activist media use in ecological terms. Emiliano Treré and Anne Kaun, for instance, argue that:

The conception of media ecologies offered by Treré and Kaun, however, also reveals some points of theoretical (and perhaps disciplinary) divergence, offering a slightly different lens to the epistemological approach to that offered by this book’s editors elsewhere.¹⁹ Here it is the relationship between media that is being understood in ecological terms, rather than using the framework of ‘digital ecologies’ to conceptualise the novel ways that digital media are entangled with non-human life. Treré and Kaun’s usage of ‘media ecology’, in contrast, has emerged from a long history of within media studies, albeit one where uses of ‘ecology’ have shifted over time: from early medium theory in the 1960s, which used ecosystem metaphors to understand the relations between media (wherein the ecological niche of a particular medium might be lost with the ascendency of newer communications technologies), to Deleuzian-inspired scholarship in early 2000s software studies that stresses how the dynamic relations between media and user practices create media-ecological affordances that structure worlds.²⁰

Andrew Dwyer’s (Chapter 10) work complements this exploration of how conceiving of media itself in ecological terms might add another layer of complexity to digital ecologies research, in his examination of the agency of software. Engaging with, but moving beyond, software studies’ focus on glitches and breakdowns as the elements that disrupt human mastery over technological systems, Dwyer reframes the agency of software as ‘recursive’ wherein socio-technical systems are mediated by code that is responding to previous code.²¹ Through vignettes of research in a malware detection lab, Dwyer charts how software’s own recursive agency might disrupt socio-technical infrastructures in unexpected ways, prompting questions about how to account for this additional layer of agency when researching digital ecologies. Sophia Doyle and Katharine Dow’s (Chapter 8) beautiful exploration of seed databases, likewise, draws productive connections with software studies, pointing to the underlying cultural techniques that regulate ways of engaging with seeds as knowledge is formatted into databases.²² What is so inspiring and hopeful about this chapter, however, is the ongoing presence of resistance to these cultural techniques, as seed activists resist and subvert technology to contest regimes of intellectual property.

Mari Arold’s (Chapter 11) vital rejoinder to ‘remember the analogue’ offers an important through-line between these bodies of literature, making me excited at the potential for expanded narratives about the processes of mediation that constitute digital ecologies. Just as media scholarship has traced all matter of media that constitute the communication ecologies of protest movements – from posters and placards to messaging apps and front-stage social media platforms – Arold foregrounds the importance of processes of mediation to digital ecologies scholarship that exceed narrow conceptions of ‘the digital’ itself.²³

Conclusion

Through their varied approaches to digital media, the chapters in this book offer valuable pathways for me to reflect on future dialogue between more-than-human geographies and media studies that, I feel, is useful in conceptualising and grasping the ethical implications of digital ecologies. What many chapters reveal is not just that digital ecologies foster both ethical potential and harm in turn, but that potentials are perhaps inextricable from harm. The environmental potentials and pitfalls of digital infrastructures can thus prove difficult to parse.²⁴ In such contexts, perhaps the only recourse is to offer a reminder that, in line with important interventions made in feminist science studies, no relations or entanglements are ever ‘innocent’.²⁵

Yet while refrains about the non-innocence of more-than-human entanglements are important, they are less helpful in exploring how to actually navigate choppy ethical waters wherein processes of ecological damage require intervention, redress, and repair.²⁶ To revisit Susan Leigh Star’s valuable reminder: technology can order the world in particular ways that embed relations of power and domination through mundane processes of classification as well as large-scale computational infrastructures. If these socio-technical arrangements are invisible, then so too are these oppressive relations which – in turn – makes it difficult to grasp where more hopeful potentials for intervention and resistance might exist. For me, what was most hopeful about the chapters in this book were the set of potential tools that digital ecologies research might have for the relations emerging as more-than-human worlds become entangled with digital media in ever more complex ways.