Human Geography
How are digital objects such as hashtags, links, likes, and images involved in the production of forest politics? This chapter explores the online composition of environmental events, with a focus on the 2019 Amazon forest fires. Through a series of empirical vignettes with data and visual material from online platforms we examine how digital platforms, objects, and devices perform and organise relations between forests and a wide variety of societal actors, issues, and cultures – from bots to boycotts, agriculture to eco-activism, scientists to pop stars, Indigenous communities to geopolitical interventions. In particular, in the case of the Amazon fires the chapter explores the algorithmic meditation of environment events; which kinds of concerns, framings, entities, and invitations to action ‘do well’ according to online platforms; how relations between different concerns and groups are invited and displayed; and the roles of images in online activity around the fires. Looking beyond concerns with the representational (in-)fidelities of forest media and thinking along with research on ontological politics and the social lives of methods, we consider how collaborative methodological experiments in repurposing digital objects and online materials might contribute to tracing, eliciting, and unfolding the contested roles of forests in society.
In response to slow and limited climate action in Australia by federal governments, children and young people have been using and making digital worlds to join global climate movements and demonstrate their agency. This chapter analyses the lead-up to, and occurrence of, a School Strike 4 Climate event during 2021, as an example of how children and young people are actively co-creating reparative digital worlds to confront, and hopefully renegotiate, environmental and social injustices. The digital content that facilitates, coordinates, records, and amplifies the in-person strikes and rallies is curated with a view to building solidarity and working towards better futures by centring Country and advocating for climate justice.
In an era of mass extinction, climate emergency, and biodiversity collapse, what role do digital media have in securing liveable futures? To what extent are digital media mitigating or intensifying environmental crises? And what theoretical, empirical, and methodological frameworks are needed to make sense of emerging digital ecologies? In a context where digital media are reshaping the futures of conservation, environmentalism, and ecological politics – for better and for worse – Digital Ecologies confronts the political and ethical stakes of these developments. The collection draws together leading social science and humanities scholars, in order to examine the growing entanglement of animals, plants, and ecosystems with digital media technologies. The book’s original empirical chapters explore novel mediated encounters between humans and other animals: from exercise apps where users race wild animals to livestreams of chickens and lobsters, and digital sound recordings of extinct species. Authors interrogate new forms of governance and surveillance arising with digital media – as satellite-tagged birds monitor the high seas or digital smart forests and seed databases reconfigure life in new ways. More broadly, the book explores the political and ethical potentials new assemblages of human, animals, technologies, and environments as social media creates complex opportunities for environmental activism and new ecologies of software emerge. Beginning with the editors’ own agenda-setting introduction and closing with three chapter-length provocations for the future of research in the field, the book offers both an overview and intervention into the rapidly expanding field of digital ecologies.
This chapter examines human encounters with non-human beings and places through digital sound, and the role digital sound plays in interspecies relations. First, we reflect upon the recent proliferation of digital sound archives and sonic ecological monitoring techniques and technologies, exploring their contributions to environmental conservation efforts and their ability to forge new kinds of encounters with the non-human world. Along the way, we highlight some concerns that have been raised in relation to these modes of listening, such as the role of Big Tech companies in producing ecological data sets and asymmetrical power relations that are reproduced through digital listening. We also consider how digital sound alters material ecologies in multi-faceted ways, ranging from the luring or deterring of non-human beings to the environmental damages involved in creating and consuming this ostensibly intangible medium. Throughout the chapter, we draw upon recent case studies and relevant literature from across the natural and social sciences as a means to highlight the status of what we term ‘digital sonic ecologies’, which helps us to critically theorise the multifarious interrelations between the digital, the sonic, and the non-human. We end our discussion by identifying new avenues for further critical research in this area.
Popularly, computation – incorporating hardware, software, and sensors – have rarely been understood as more-than-human and ecological, but rather as technologies under human control and knowability. In this chapter, I advocate, alongside previous work outside of geography, for conceptualising computation as ecological. Through an examination of computationality as a performative interaction with an ecology of materials supported by capacities for (re)cognition, I suggest that computation is productive of a more-than-human politics. Using vignettes from an autoethnography of the analysis and detection of malicious software, I discuss how computation affords certain properties as much as it is generative of new interpretations of security that are threaded together across environments, big data, and human decisions in cybersecurity. Through recursive logics, enabled by computationality, computation is then engaged in shared (political) processes of choice-making that both shape, and are shaped by, various ecologies. Using cybersecurity as an exemplar, I explore how its drive to render detection at greater speed and against ‘unseen’ threats means that it has increasingly leveraged computation’s capacity to recognise and reason whether software is malicious or not. Computation, in this collective reading, is then a political actor in-formation that reads, interprets, and acts. I use this to complicate more-than-human ecologies, as well as its application to perspectives on digital geography and cybersecurity. This is to suggest that various ‘digital’ ecologies are not simply hosted on computation, but are intertwined and are actively reworked through computationality, producing new ecologies that may be incommensurable to representational scrutiny.
Digital technologies increasingly mediate relations between humans and non-humans in a range of contexts including environmental governance, surveillance, and entertainment. Combining approaches from more-than-human and digital geographies as well as media studies, this introductory chapter proffers ‘digital ecologies’ as an analytical framework for examining digitally mediated more-than-human worlds.
In recent decades, the proliferation of information technologies has given rise to the so-called ‘digital turn’ in geography and cognate social science disciplines. The continuously renewing repertoires aim at grasping how digital tools, platforms, and interactions shape our perceptions of phenomena mediated through them. In carefully capturing the specificities of digital mediation, however, these efforts have sometimes under-emphasised (1) the wider milieu of digital and non-digital elements involved in empirical contexts and (2) what digital and analogue mediations have in common and could thus be consolidated under a shared framework. Digital ecologies scholarship needs a rejuvenated approach to mediated natures – one that simultaneously accounts for digital/analogue, discursive/material, and tangible/ethereal mediations of phenomena. Set amid an environmental conflict over Estonian forests, this empirically driven chapter appropriates the concept of mediation for more-than-human encounters, using notions of attunements and conductivity, mediative loops, augmented and compressed realities, synchronies and sequences, and multimodal complementarity. It proposes a movement from digital towards mediated geographies that also accommodate the analogue. It concludes with five theoretical premises for any future research that wishes to pursue a holistic framework of mediations in the context of more-than-human worlds.
This chapter interrogates the political and ecological implications of digital transformations in ocean governance through a case study of on-bird fisheries surveillance using albatrosses. We bring together digital and more-than-human geographies, political ecology, and science and technology studies to critically assess an emerging model of ocean governance exemplified through this case. Our account is attentive to the lively agencies of technologies, animals, and oceanic volumes, as well as to the power structures governing these more-than-human assemblages. We first outline a new wet ontology of the ocean and its attendant modes of governance. Second, we consider the risks presented by these governance approaches to the animals they enrol. Lastly, we interrogate how these approaches naturalise surveillance as a solution to marine ecological issues. In conclusion, we reflect on the potential for digital ecologies research to address these new data-driven and animal-borne approaches to marine science and governance, and to offer cross-disciplinary understandings of these novel forms of governance as they emerge.
In 2019, the global numbers of chickens totalled around 25.9 billion. Yet, in urban Western societies, chickens are absent from our daily lives. Our Chicken Life, a twenty-four-hour livestream of a flock of seventy chickens in Utah, offers a solution for those wanting to connect with these once-familiar birds. With a few clicks, viewers can hang out with chickens and, for five dollars monthly, participate in their care. What makes Our Chicken Life distinctive from other animal livestreams is the ability for paid subscribers to ‘feed’ the birds, releasing mealworms from a chute next to one of the fifteen cameras when a command is entered into a chat-box. These cameras are controlled by subscribers, who can focus on different events and individuals around the barnyard. Our Chicken Life is a unique case study for digital ecologies where non-human labour, care and control, and more-than-human communities intermingle. In this chapter, I explore Our Chicken Life’s communing of care and control through digital encounters, contending that this galline digital ecology produces forms of byproductive labour for chickens. Ultimately, I argue that this is a new way of eking capital from non-human bodies.
Smart cities typically involve the digitalisation of transport and buildings, energy and communications. Yet urban natures are also becoming increasingly digitalised, whether through processes of monitoring, automation, mitigation, or augmentation. This chapter considers what digital ecologies and ‘splintering urbanisms’ materialise through programming nature as infrastructure. By focusing specifically on smart urban forests, I suggest that the management logics of smart infrastructures attempt to program and transform vegetation and its ecologies into uniquely efficient and responsive urban organisms. In the process, these programmes of efficiency have the potential to exacerbate extractive economies and social inequalities that amplify and materialise through the ‘internet of nature’.