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Digital ecologies: Materialities, encounters, governance
Abstract
Digital technologies increasingly mediate relations between humans and nonhumans in a range of contexts including environmental governance, surveillance, and entertainment. Combining approaches from more-than-human and digital geographies, we proffer ‘digital ecologies’ as an analytical framework for examining digitally-mediated human–nonhuman entanglement. We identify entanglement as a compelling basis from which to articulate and critique digitally-mediated relations in diverse situated contexts. Three questions guide this approach: What digital technologies and infrastructures give rise to digital entanglement, and with what material consequences? What is at stake socially, politically, and economically when encounters with nonhumans are digitised? And how are digital technologies enrolled in programmes of environmental governance? We develop our digital ecologies framework across three core conceptual themes of wider interest to environmental geographers: (i) materialities, considering the infrastructures which enable digitally-mediated more-than-human connections and their socioenvironmental impacts; (ii) encounters, examining the political economic consequences and convivial potentials of digitising contact zones; (iii) governance, questioning how digital technologies produce novel forms of more-than-human governance. We affirm that digital mediations of more-than-human worlds can potentially cultivate environmentally progressive communities, convivial human–nonhuman encounters, and just forms of environmental governance, and as such note the urgency of these conversations.
... Do digitalized practices of sensing, abstraction and algorithmic recombination simply mirror a pre-existing and external Nature, or do they reconfigure how people come to conceptualise nature, resignify the ways by which it matters, and alter the definition of the boundary between natural and social worlds? Circulating extensively outside of the ivory tower, the notion of "digital nature" is clearly not just an academic construct (Nelson, Hawkins & Govia, 2022;Turnbull et al., 2023). Cultural, educational and research institutions worldwide are engaging with digital technologies by asking: where does nature start, where does it end, and where do humans sit within these beginnings and ends? ...
... Similar accounts to the one put forward by Searle, Turnbull et al. can be found in other research aimed at exploring how a range of publics use digital technologies to observe animals in the wild. Recognising that nature has historically been mediated through analogue technologies (from printed material and photography to taxidermy, amongst others), von Essen, Turnbull et al. (2023) discuss the authenticity of wild animals' image online. Their point is not that digital engagements with wildlife lack authenticity, but that authenticity is constructed differently in each case-be it through high resolution observation, extended temporal interaction in 24-hour virtual livecasts, or the dual observation of radio-tagged animals in person and on digital maps. ...
... Despite emerging research on the capacities and abilities of animals to resist domination and subjectification (e.g. Evans & Adams, 2018;Hawkins & Paxton, 2019), applications of digital technologies towards animals typically represent both a form of biosurveillance and a new biopolitical instrument for controlling wildlife-a technological gaze that problematises possibilities for realising animal agency (von Essen, Turnbull et al., 2023). This suggests the need to tread carefully when imagining the transformative possibilities of digital natures. ...
Digital tools and practices are transforming societal relationships with non-human worlds—whether through smartphone apps that city dwellers use to navigate urban forests, robotic bees that pollinate crops, or webcams that livestream rare birds' nests. Recent academic and popular interest in the coming together of digital and natural worlds has generated both creative and critical reflections on what the digital means for the very concept of nature, troubling the latter's ontological stability. In this Introduction to the special issue Digital Natures: Reconfiguring Ontologies, Epistemologies, and Politics we claim that the digital, when considered beyond an epistemological register, is a productive and political force that is unsettling, rather than reinforcing, the boundaries between society and nature. We review the extensive body of work from across geography and the social sciences that is actively engaging with digital–nature intersections, and historicise current debates through reference to the figures of the cyborg, technonatures, biomimicry and digital organisms. Asking whether digitalized practices of sensing, abstraction and algorithmic recombination simply mirror a pre-existing and external Nature, or whether they advance a reconceptualization of nature, we set out to trace the progressive political potential of a digitally-entangled ontological redefinition of nature. We discuss how, within emerging digital natures, agencies are entangled in a reimagining of what both nature and society are about. Here, we argue, lies the transformative potential of digital natures—precisely in challenging and subverting the ontological place of an external Nature. The introduction finishes by simultaneously outlining a research agenda for digital natures and presenting the six papers that comprise the special issue.
... The technonatural present is characterised by digital entanglement, involving both the ubiquity of digital mediation across society (including geographical research and praxis), and the recognition that digital mediation is itself ecological: it concerns the relations between and assemblages of human and nonhuman bodies, environments, and technologies (see Jørgensen, 2014;Taffel, 2019). This conception of the present further articulates our desire to bring digital geographies and more-thanhuman geographies into closer conversation in future geographical work through the framework of digital ecologies (see Turnbull et al., 2022). Engagements with the digital mediation of more-than-human worlds are frequently characterised by speculation and spectacular narratives of techno-apocalyptic despair and techno-utopian futurism, with limited grounding in the technonatural present. ...
... At the confluence of these research themes, we have proposed 'digital ecologies' as an analytical framework for examining the relations and politics between humans, other species, and digital technologies. This framework asks what these relations are, where they occur, and why and to whom they matter (see Turnbull et al., 2022). ...
Ecological collapse and the proliferation of digitally mediated relations are two conjoined elements of the ‘technonatural present’, which pose varied challenges and openings for the future of geographical thought and praxis beyond the delineated sub-disciplinary concerns of more-than-human and digital geographies. In this commentary, we draw attention to the inseparability, now and into the future, of geographical thought and praxis from digital mediation. This mediation is also central to forms of encounter, exploitation, and governance shaping human-nonhuman relations. Within this complex nexus of humans, nonhumans, environments, and technologies, it is crucial to critically examine how nature is made (mediated) and remade (remediated), by whom, for whom, and with whom. We call for research that affirmatively centres the potentials for progressive digitally-mediated environmentalisms, drawing from Agnieszka Leszczynski and Sarah Elwood's work on ‘glitch epistemologies’. To conclude, we point to a series of themes and questions that geographers might usefully engage with as they navigate digitally (re)mediated catastrophic times.
... Digital mediation relationships have the potential to grow progressive environmental communities, because there is a meeting between humans and non-humans (technology) and the creation of a better form of government (Turnbull et al., 2022). ...
This study is a critical perspective in exploring changes in social, cultural and political forms related to the development of contemporary communication technology. The main theme of this research is YouTube's digital space with the topic of utilizing the main features of geo-tagging, hashtags and live streaming. Researchers observed three content creators in utilizing the features of the digital platform to carry out social interactions and actions. The purpose of this study is to explain that the character of the users and the current use of digital platforms is a representation of the interaction and socio-cultural situation of contemporary society as a part of the digital ecosystem. This research is qualitative in nature with specific observations on micro phenomena, so the results are not generalizations, but in the form of data findings to support the hypothesis, namely the importance of a critical perspective of digital ecology to explain contemporary digital ecosystem phenomena. This article is supported by comparative descriptions and descriptions of the development of several theoretical models as well as social-technological changes that have occurred before. This research contributes to providing an important perspective that media and technology studies must move from discussions about human and technology interactions, to discussions about human interactions in technology. As a study of ongoing phenomena, the researcher places this research by opening up to the potential for the latest changes that can occur along with technological developments.
... Sometimes interaction with animals in the home is limited to virtual, one-sided encounters due to a long distance. The proliferation of digital encounters of different types (Turnbull et al., 2023) has brought the lives of physically distant wild animals to human homes, such as in the case of 'nestcams'. These developments have led to concern about breaching the privacy of these animals, rendering them vulnerable to undesired human encounters including poaching (Paci et al., 2022). ...
This paper proposes a change in the conceptualisation of home, as part of a wider paradigmatic transformation in the understandings of the boundaries between humans and animals, and nature and culture. A new concept of multispecies homescapes is suggested, building on recent work on human–animal relationships as well as writings on the home in human geography. Multispecies homescapes are approached as imaginary spaces, including experiences of sharing home with other species, the limits and liminalities of homeness, and the loss of a multispecies home. Imagining home as multispecies will widen the scope of research beyond anthropocentric understandings of domestic space.
... This is the result of hidden layers in their industrial pipeline, each requiring energetic input that is largely fuelled by extractive, deep time energy sources (Taffel, 2012). "Indeed, the digital technologies used to understand the effects of climate change and to study the ecological effects of mining rare earth minerals are somewhat ironically built using these very same minerals and are powered by the fossil fuels that are driving climate change" (Turnbull, et al., 2023). (Taffel, 2019, p. 183) These entangled relations are addressed in Section 2.3 (Complex Systems, Ecologies, & Ecosophy), which expands on the properties of complex systems and how social ecologies cannot be separated from environmental ecologies. ...
Gardening the Cybernetic Meadow is a research-creation project that engages with the fields of interdisciplinary art, ecology, and sustainable energy technologies drawing energy from bio-matter (soil microbes). Microbial fuel cells (hereby MFCs) are a type of bio-based fuel cell, or more broadly a soil-based generator and battery. MFCs are a regenerative energy technology that use soil as medium and uptake energy through collecting by-products of microbial metabolism. The outcomes of Gardening the Cybernetic Meadow's research-creation are disseminated through multiple modes of knowledge sharing, shifting away from a primary reliance on the traditional written thesis. Inspired by research-creation frameworks of scholars such as Natalie Loveless (2019), it distributes the thesis' research results through three methods. 1) an interdisciplinary, participatory art installation (sharing the title of this thesis); 2) an open-source microbial fuel cell fabrication guide generated through the documentation of the research-creation process; 3) this component, the written thesis. Guided by theoretical frameworks encompassing critical making, relational aesthetics, and temporal aesthetics, the project not only challenges traditional modes of research dissemination but also offers a tangible platform for engaging diverse audiences across artistic and scientific domains. Gardening the Cybernetic Meadow aspires to reshape future inquiries by propelling investigations into sustainable energy, ecological interdependence, and experiential learning. This undertaking exemplifies the fusion of creativity and technology while nurturing a dynamic ecosystem of collaboration, contemplation, and transformative thought.
... Despite pledges to greener solutions from major companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Sony (de Zwart, 2022;Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2021), their implementations are at best prime examples of greenwashing (de Freitas Netto et al., 2020), where their initiatives have more to do with branding and marketing rather than reducing their GHG emissions in their production and supply chain. It is therefore also incredibly jarring to see the games industry and surrounding media journalism innocently talk about a 'future' with newer console generations and so-called 'cloud gaming' that relies on big data centers, as these techno-fetishistic projects to build new servers, consoles, and phones are antithetical to human survival (Monserrate, 2022;Turnbull et al., 2023). The stable ecosystem that underpins our civilization does not allow for more growth and more consumption (Heron, 2023), yet the Anglophonic conversations around 'next-generation' gaming hardware continues unabated. ...
This article highlights the interrelated crises that the games industry, its digital game consumers, and the academic field of game studies are embedded in and responsible for reproducing. By couching our analysis in Marxist, feminist, anti-fascist, and anti-imperialist understandings of how our social relations arise from the historical-material basis of society, we identify several different conditions of modern digital games that everyone working in and around games should confront and take seriously, especially regarding contemporary and future impacts and restrictions on the type of research and education we are able to conduct. These crises emerge from social and economic structures including imperialism, racism, militarism, fascism, and patriarchy. To better confront them, we broadly define the causes from which the morbid symptoms we witness arise in primarily Western societies and how they manifest in the games industry, its consumers, and its academic institutions. Based off these aspects, we extrapolate their trajectory in how they will change and adapt to the future of games and of their study, as the ecological and social crises intensify and reverberate. This allows us to propose potential strategies for radically confronting and potentially overcoming the looming crises related to war, patriarchy, white supremacy, famine, destitution, fascism, and climate apocalypse.
This report provides a scoping review of the literature on the ways that novel generative AI tools are being applied to living things and other elements of ecosystems and the natural environment. The report outlines several areas where generative AI is being deployed in new research projects and industry applications. These include animal communication and agriculture and plant cultivation as well as environmental sustainability, biodiversity, climate change and nature conservation initiatives. The report also details some of the negative environmental costs and ethical issues associated with the manufacture, training and infrastructure that support generative AI and large language models more generally.
This book has sought to problematize a purely clinical approach for exploring MHapps and has adopted the use of a vital materialist perspective for studying the sociocultural dimensions of MHapps. In looking at applied examples in the previous chapters, we have outlined some of the alternative ways of studying MHapps and started to explore the complex ways that affect flows through these spaces. In this final chapter, we aim to draw together some practical conclusions and identify the main areas of interest for an applied psychosocial perspective of MHapps. This perspective resists an individual, internal logic that would seek to locate any change from using an app in a discrete set of psychological phenomena. Instead, we have been interested in the capacity for the body to be affected and to affect others. This focuses on the potential (or restrictions) for movement and the ways that bodies feel empowered to move in the context of the available atmospheres and the assemblage of the relations therein.
How do technologies animate more-than-human geographies after extinction? How can geographical scholarship evoke, or bring presence to, extinct biota? In an epoch simultaneously characterized by biotic loss at an unthinkable scale and the increased presence of representations depicting nonhuman life through mass media and digitization, we examine the epistemic, affective, and ethical possibilities of extinct animal traces to shape more-than-human geographies. We show how technological apparatuses inaugurate afterlives of extinction troubling binaries of extinct–extant and absence–presence. Specifically, we consider audio and visual remains of two taxa producing awkward and unsettling postextinction geographies: the ivory-billed woodpecker and the bucardo. Sound recordings and other historical traces continue to forge contemporary connections between human searchers and the ivory-billed woodpecker, although no sighting of the ghost bird has been universally accepted since 1944. The bucardo was declared extinct in 2000, but it was tentatively reanimated through a failed 2003 cloning project; in this milieu, visual technologies and representations conjure alternative presence and speculative futures beyond technoscientific spectacle. Through conversing our own situated, speculative, and technologically mediated relations with these taxa—and situating the technological assemblages themselves—we present some of the lively, contested, and dispersed ways technological apparatuses affect and inaugurate animated geographies after extinction.
Forests are zones of multiple temporalities. They keep time and are constituted through time-keeping practices. Digital technologies of environmental monitoring and management increasingly organise forest temporalities. This article considers how emerging techno-temporalities measure, pace, and transform forest worlds while reproducing and reconfiguring longer durations of colonial and capitalist technologies. We draw together scholarship on political forests, digital media temporalities, and anti-colonial and Indigenous thinking to analyse the politics of time that materialise through digital technologies and shape what forest pasts, presents, and futures are senseable and possible. In particular, we trace the socio-technical production of the ‘real-time’ as a temporal register of experiencing, knowing, and governing forest environments. Analysing a real-time deforestation alert system in the Amazon, we consider how these temporalities valorise immediate, continuous forest data that can be mobilised for understanding and protecting forests, while simultaneously glossing over durational colonial and capitalist framings of forests that rely on dispossession, extraction, and enclosure. The second half of the article turns to Indigenous futurisms and artistic and socio-political uses of digital platforms that rework forest temporalities. By analysing these multiple and sometimes contradictory temporalities, we suggest that these practices and interventions can challenge dominant timelines and their inequities through pluralistic and redistributive configurations of temporality, land, and data sovereignty.
Video games could offer interactive and immersive environments for players to meaningfully engage with ecological topics. The literature base is expanding to offer more studies concerning links between commercial games and players’ ecological knowledge, relationships, and interactions. The primary objective of this systematic map is to provide an overview of the available literature regarding use of commercial video games to engage players with biodiversity conservation.
Que se passe-t-il si nous prenons au sérieux le vivant comme concept politique ? En partant de l’abandon de l’ontologie moderne fondée sur la distinction entre nature et culture, cet article explore les perspectives ouvertes par le tournant du vivant et poursuit deux objectifs : distinguer les principaux objets conceptuels et débats qui constituent le champ de la recherche sur le vivant, et distinguer l’intérêt qu’il y a à investir le vivant comme sujet et/ou objet politique pour la pensée critique contemporaine. Pour faire du vivant un objet politique, nous partons du constat que ce dernier impose la reconnaissance d’une réalité hybride, où l’agentivité qui caractérise une multitude d’êtres leur permet de faire territoire sur un lieu où émerge une vie sociale interespèces organisant cet espace. Nous abordons ces trois débats en mobilisant des travaux qui réalisent par leur parti pris pour le vivant une avancée dans l’« art d’observer » les alliances entre humains et non-humains dans des endroits parfois inattendus. Cette démarche nous permet ensuite d’appréhender ce qui vient après la nature en discutant trois modèles de relation des humains au vivant : celui de la soustraction qui prend le contre-pied de l’actuelle domination sur la nature, celui de légation où la relation avec le vivant mène l’humain à composer son action et son territoire avec d’autres vivants, et celui de la coexistence qui tient compte de l’historique moderne et entend bien éviter de reconduire une telle tragédie en s’efforçant de sanctuariser des zones pour laisser libre cours au vivant. Nous complétons cette discussion ontologique par un questionnement du rôle des sciences, notamment pour ouvrir de nouvelles médiations. Nous concluons sur les luttes émancipatrices qui agissent pour le vivant, sans la nature.
Technologies have been theorised to understand their powers to produce spacetimes – notably through Bernard Stiegler’s reading of technics as constitutive of human ontology. However, less attention has been paid to how technologies shape spacetimes according to their own distinct logics of evolution, the result being a tendency to reduce technological agency to a question of its effects on human being. The first half of the paper elaborates this problem in conversation with geographies of the digital turn. The second half introduces an alternative approach through Gilbert Simondon’s ontogenetic notion of technology characterised by its own logics of evolution – what I term techno-genesis.
This commentary proposes a research agenda for the concept of feminist digital natures (FDN). To demonstrate how we see FDN connecting existing research efforts, we review both the well-established and much-needed work in three overlapping areas of scholarship where we see the potential for productive discussions, new questions, and empirical analysis: feminist digital geographies (FDG), digital natures (DN), and feminist political ecology (FPE). We offer specific and grounded examples of topics and questions that scholars might pursue through an FDN approach. We encourage sustained, collaborative, and critical attention to the uneven consequences and political terrain of understanding natures as increasingly digitally monitored, managed, manipulated, and represented. We can and should think with digital relations, and we might benefit from new creative conversations across our areas of inquiry and action.
Landscape connectivity, the extent to which a landscape facilitates the flow of ecological processes such as organism movement, has emerged as a central focus of landscape ecology and conservation science. Connectivity modelling now encompasses an enormous body of work across ecological theory and application. The dominant connectivity models in use today are based on the framework of ‘landscape resistance’, which is a way of measuring how landscape structure influences movement patterns. However, the simplistic assumptions and high degree of reductionism inherent to the landscape resistance paradigm severely limits the ability of connectivity algorithms to account for many fundamental aspects of animal movement, and thus greatly reduces the effectiveness and relevance of connectivity models for conservation theory and practice. In this paper, we first provide an overview of the development of connectivity modelling and resistance surfaces. We then discuss several key drivers of animal movement which are absent in resistance-based models, with a focus on spatiotemporal variation, human and interspecies interactions, and other context-dependent effects. We look at a range of empirical studies which highlight the strong impact these effects have on movement and connectivity predictions. But we also provide promising avenues of future research to address this: we discuss newly emerging technologies and interdisciplinary work, and look to developing methodologies, models and conversations which move beyond the limiting framework of landscape resistance, so that connectivity models can better reflect the complexities and richness of animal movement.
Digital technologies are increasingly influencing forest landscape restoration practices worldwide. We investigate how digital platforms specifically reconfigure restoration practices, resources, and policy across scales. By analyzing digital restoration platforms, we identify four drivers of technological developments, including: scientific expertise to optimize decisions; capacity building through digital networks; digital tree-planting markets to operate supply chains; and community participation to foster co-creation. Our analysis shows how digital developments transform restoration practices by producing techniques, remaking networks, creating markets, and reorganizing participation. These transformations often involve power imbalances regarding expertise, finance, and politics across the Global North and Global South. However, the distributed qualities of digital systems can also create alternative ways of undertaking restoration actions. We propose that digital developments for restoration should not be understood as neutral tools but rather as power-laden processes that can create, perpetuate, or counteract social and environmental inequalities.
We explore the implications of blockchain technology for conservation and environmental policy. Drawing on an analysis of 27 initiatives, we examine their goals, assumptions, visions and workings. We find that these initiatives do not yet form a coherent approach, there is too much variety in their environmental focus, and the role of blockchain technology in achieving their goals. However, they share a faith in environmental-commodity markets, a penchant for surveillance and upward accountability, and lack a critical analysis of the main causes of environmental problems. Blockchain initiatives are forming a growing community of praxis and deepen ongoing trends in neoliberal environmental governance, characterised by the increased commodification and global accounting, surveillance and marketisation of environmental goods, services and outcomes. We suggest these services and outcomes fail to challenge the actual root causes of environmental degradation. At the same time, they are not all necessarily flawed by these characteristics. They can render information held by communities financially valuable in ways those communities may find useful. Future research should focus on exploring whether blockchain initiatives may at least translate in concrete environmental outcomes and contribute to the well-being of natural resource managers.
Privacy is an essential consideration when designing interactive systems for humans. However, at a time when interactive technologies are increasingly targeted at non-human animals and deployed within multispecies contexts, the question arises as to whether we should extend privacy considerations to other animals. To address this question, we revisited early scholarly work on privacy, which examines privacy dynamics in non-human animals (henceforth “animals”). Then, we analysed animal behaviour literature describing privacy-related behaviours in different species. We found that animals use a variety of separation and information management mechanisms, whose function is to secure their own and their assets' safety, as well as negotiate social interactions. In light of our findings, we question tacit assumptions and ordinary practises that involve human technology and that affect animal privacy. Finally, we draw implications for the design of interactive systems informed by animals' privacy requirements and, more broadly, for the development of privacy-aware multispecies interaction design.
Making‐of documentaries (MODs) for recent blue‐chip wildlife films are prominently featured as trailers, bonus features on DVD releases and websites, and televised segments within wildlife broadcasts.
Prior research shows how MODs within mainstream cinema promote certain filmmakers as auteurs and as exceptional creative professionals. Earlier wildlife film MODs demonstrated filmmakers' mastery of nature and a licence to offer scientific knowledge, as well as many staging practices employed in wildlife filmmaking; this content moved to MODs as nature grew more pristine in wildlife films' main programming.
Recent wildlife film MODs still celebrate filmmakers' professionalism and emphasize the remoteness of film locations, filmmakers' exceptional practical skills and scientific expertise under harsh conditions, and the technologies responsible for spectacular visuals. In the MOD for Chimpanzee (2012), these features work together to portray this wildlife species as challenging to locate and film in nature, accessible only by filmmakers with the right skills and technologies.
I argue that current blue‐chip wildlife MODs are a performance of authentic, non‐interventionist filmmaking. Recent MODs increase viewers' behind‐the‐scenes access to filming conditions but have not disclosed certain staging practices such as the use of composite animal characters.
Despite their prominence as marketing and peripheral material, MODs remain segregated from wildlife films' main programming. They contribute to a blue‐chip construction of nature as pristine and not inclusive of human beings, even though their expeditionary narratives show more complex human–nature interactions.
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The conceptual proposal of a “government of things” takes up important insights and theoretical achievements of new materialist scholarship. It shares the interest in reconceptualizing matter and the focus on the interplay of epistemological, ontological, and ethical issues, and insists on the limits of anthropocentric modes of thought. However, in synthesizing Foucault’s analytics of government with STS-inspired work, the concept of a “government of things” also goes beyond new materialist scholarship. It puts forward a relational and performative account of materialities that more closely attends to the historical and political dimensions of ontologies. The study proposes that the notion of the dispositive, a comprehensive understanding of technology, and a complex reading of the milieu provide elements for a thoroughly relational account of materialism. The first part of the book (“Varieties of Materialism”) engages with three main streams of new materialist scholarship (object-oriented ontology, vital materialism, and agential realism). The second part (“Elements of a More-than-Human Analytics of Government”) turns to Foucault’s work. It seeks to spell out important conceptual and analytical tools for a non-anthropocentric and relational-materialist analytics of government. The third part of the book (“Toward a Relational Materialism”) argues for an alignment of Foucault’s analytics of government with work in STS to better account for contemporary political trajectories and topologies.
Due to habitat fragmentation, Brazil's Atlantic Forest is considered one of the world's most threatened biodiversity hotspots. Much of the biome has become extinct of its largest-bodied mammals,leading some to refer it as a 'half-empty forest.' One of the ways conservation actors are responding to this crisis is by utilizing Global Positioning System(GPS), camera trapping, and remote sensing satellite imagery. Together, these tools enable the collection of data at unprecedent levels. By intensifying wildlife monitoring, it is thought that better-directed actions can be taken to avoid species extinction. Although there is a nascent body of research in political ecology examining the role of these new technologies in conservation,so far there has been little exploration of what this implies for the transformation of the governance of conservation spaces. Bringing together literatures on biopolitics of conservation and conservation technologies, this article reflects on the ways new technologies are changing the biopolitical governance of conservation in the Atlantic Forest. I argue that the increase of information flows, together with the ability to process data through models and algorithms, intensifies the capability of biopolitical governance to justify claims for new protected areas, while changing ecological subjectivities. With the increased use of remote sensing technologies, some ecologists are being distanced from the field, and are consequently having less interactions with rural communities. As pressures on biodiversity increase, this may facilitate advocacy for coercive conservation measures that have adverse impacts on local communities.
This paper examines gender-biases on Stack Overflow, the world’s largest question-and-answer forum of programming knowledge. Employing a non-binary gender identification built on usernames, I investigate the role of gender in shaping users’ experience in technical forums. The analysis encompasses 11-years of activity, across levels of expertise, language, and specialism, to assess if Stack Overflow is really a paradise for programmers. I first examine individual users, asking if there are gender differences in key user metrics of success, focusing on reputation points, user tenure, and level of activity. Second, I test if there are gender-biases in how technical knowledge is recognised in the question-answer format of the platform. Third, using social network analysis I investigate if interaction on Stack Overflow is organised by gender. Results show that sharing and recognising technical knowledge is dictated by users’ gender, even when it is operationalised beyond a binary. I find that feminine users receive lower scores for their answers, despite exhibiting higher effort in their contributions. I also show that interaction on Stack Overflow is organised by gender. Specifically, that feminine users preferentially interact with other feminine users. The findings emphasise the central role of gender in shaping interaction in technical spaces, a necessity for participation in the masculine-dominated forum. I conclude the study with recommendations for inclusivity in online forums.
Walking is a practice that often centers humans as moving and experiencing subjects. Whether on solitary rambles or in collective social and political engagements, people are central to understanding places on the move. However, multiple organisms and environments are also involved in moving practices. This article decenters human movement to ask: How does the forest walk? In a time when forest sites might also be inaccessible to multiple people who are remote from forest locations, this article further considers how digital fieldwork becomes a way to tune into moving forests and the relations they activate and sustain. Digital technologies differently constitute and mobilize environments in ways that can have consequences for how forests and people move, and for how environmental change is configured and addressed.
The current extinction crisis demands worldwide commitment to conservation across all sectors of society. By transcending the traditional disciplinary boundaries, conservationists can reach new audiences to communicate pro‐conservation knowledge, education and awareness messages.
There are approximately 2.7 billion video‐gamers worldwide, with millions more joining as a result of global lockdowns. In March 2020, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released by Nintendo, fast becoming the second‐best selling video game ever in Japan, and selling over 26.4 million units worldwide. Unlike many popular video games, its unique premise involves players creating an island, growing vegetation, catching wildlife and donating fossils and species to a museum. The game has been praised for its positivity, escapism and measurable benefits to mental well‐being.
Here, we articulate how different features of the game, including the islands, their biodiversity and inhabitants, encourage players to exhibit pro‐conservation behaviours and attitudes (e.g. recycling litter, or planting a diversity of flowers), as well as improving players’ knowledge about the diversity of relatively little known taxa (marine and freshwater fishes and invertebrates). We also highlight where pitfalls exist (e.g. encouraging the collection of threatened species). We principally frame these discussions in the context of Japan's cultural relationship with the natural world, including its history of insect‐collecting and its management of green spaces. We conclude by outlining some recommendations about potential improvements to future releases, or for similar games, that could further promote conservation messaging.
This perspective sheds light on the avenues through which Animal Crossing: New Horizons encourages pro‐conservation knowledge, attitudes and behaviours of its international audience, with potential for these experiences to translate into real‐world conservation actions. During a critical time in humanity's history, video gaming could therefore provide a huge opportunity for communicating conservation messages to billions of people worldwide.
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Animal-borne tags (biologgers) have now become extremely sophisticated, recording data from multiple sensors at high frequencies for long periods and, as such, have become a powerful tool for behavioural ecologists and physiologists studying wild animals. But the design and implementation of these tags is not trivial because engineers have to maximize performance and ability to function under onerous conditions while minimizing tag mass and volume (footprint) to maximize the wellbeing of the animal carriers. We present some of the major issues faced by tag engineers and show how tag designers must accept compromises while maintaining systems that can answer the questions being posed. We also argue that basic understanding of engineering issues in tag design by biologists will help feedback to engineers to better tag construction but also reduce the likelihood that tag-deploying biologists will misunderstand their own results. Finally, we suggest that proper consideration of conventional technology together with new approaches will lead to further step changes in our understanding of wild-animal biology using smart tags.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Measuring physiology in free-living animals (Part II)’.
Within policy and research debates on the smart city, the urban environment has become an arena of contestation. Claims that digitalisation will render the city more resource-efficient are countered by criticism of the tensions between smart and sustainability practices. Little attention has been paid, however, to the role of nature in digitally mediated urban environments. The flora, fauna and habitats of a city are a void in research and policy on digital urbanism. This paper provides one of the first conceptually grounded, empirical studies of ‘digital urban nature’ in practice. Taking the empirical example of Berlin, the paper demonstrates how a single city can spawn a rich variety of digital nature schemes, develops from this a typology to guide future research and analyses two schemes in depth to illustrate the aspirations and limitations of digital technologies targeting urban nature. The empirical findings are interpreted by bringing into dialogue pertinent strands of urban research: first, between smart environments and urban nature to explore ways of representing nature through digital technologies and, second, between digital and urban commons to interpret changes in the collective and individual use of urban nature. The paper reveals that digital platforms and apps are creating new ways of seeing and experiencing nature in the city, but often cling to conventional, anthropocentric notions of urban nature, with sometimes detrimental effects. More broadly, it suggests that exploring practices of digitalisation beyond the remit of conventional smart city policy can enrich scholarship on digitally mediated human-nature relations in the city.
These are uncertain times in the Anthropocene, where the health and resilience of all urban inhabitants should be key themes for cities striving for sustainability. To this end, local councils in Australia are applying digital technologies with increasing complexity as components of their urban forest management. This paper applies a more-than-human lens to analyse Australian local council urban forest policies, documents and project information for their inclusion and application of digital technologies. In this scoping review, digital geographies informed data collection to answer questions about the type, use and ownerships of tree data, and more-than-real and ‘lively data’ concepts were employed to extend their discussion.
Our analysis found that local government policies focused on general urban tree data and canopy percentages and utilised this data to justify and create policy and program parameters. There was a general lack of more-than-human considerations beyond the focus on trees in creating and designing smart urban forests, but it is unclear whether this was due to technical limitations, council desires or other factors. Challenges identified for successful outcomes included balancing priorities, access to resources and information, technological constraints, and community factors such as capacity to engage and cultural values. Digital technologies that facilitate smart urban forests tended to reinforce and re-solidify Western values. However, strengths of current applications are also evident, and we explore how they provide more-than-real possibilities for human-nature relationships to deepen and foster collaborations between disparate groups and entities in urban environments. Greater consideration and acknowledgment of the more-than-human and understanding of the more-than-real in co-creation and co-design of digital technologies and their applications may facilitate more positive outcomes for human and non-human urban inhabitants.
Information technologies have seeped their way into every aspect of our lives, mediating interactions between ourselves and our environments. They are becoming an important part of human-nature interactions, with smartphones, their apps and social media offering new ways to plan, navigate and share experiences. This article explores the changes that these mobile media technologies bring to human-nature interactions, focusing on the outdoor practices of experienced outdoor users. Drawing on observational and interview data gathered in the Scottish Highlands, we analysed hillwalkers’, mountain bikers’ and nature photographers’ interactions with mobile media technology. Using social practice theory and the idea of technologies as ‘scripts’, we found that the increased availability of information reportedly enhanced access to, confidence in and knowledge about outdoor practices. Participants negotiated the use of devices within social norms of good practice, but generally showed enthusiasm for the ever-increasing access to information. The easy access to information and the ability to share one’s performance, inscripted in the technology, guided the participants to optimise their experience. Paradoxically, this optimisation seemed to reduce the likelihood of encountering unanticipated situations that would have made their experience memorable, something our participants had previusly identified as an important aspect of their outdoor activities. Our findings illustrate the value of an in-depth empirical understanding of lived experiences, revealing how interactions between technological scripts, personal agency and social norms amplify some aspects of human-nature interactions while attenuating others. Although incremental, these changes fundamentally alter the character of our experience of nature.
Algorithms – instructions for acting on data, executed by code – are increasingly being enrolled into climate policy governance via the prediction of policy outcomes, the evaluation of climate mitigation and adaptation strategies, and the design of practitioner actions. Yet the political implications of these technological changes in environmental governance are only just beginning to be theorised. In this paper, we examine one particular facet of this emerging politics: the relationship between thinking algorithmically and hegemonic power. Drawing from Laclau and Mouffe’s theorisation of hegemony we argue that algorithmic forms of reasoning lend themselves towards producing hegemonising knowledge regimes, with important implications for a democratic politics of climate change. Recognising that algorithms stand for wider socio‐technical assemblages that structure and create knowledge, we call for greater attention to the reliance on algorithms within climate governance – less for the algorithms themselves than for their particular epistemic commitments that create algorithmic ways of thinking, with associated claims to power. Through a critical review of scholarship at the intersection of critical digital studies and environmental governance, we first identify three key epistemic commitments involved in thinking algorithmically: induction, abstraction, and optimisation. We then examine the correspondence between these key features of algorithmic thinking and the conditions that Laclau and Mouffe propose form the grounds for hegemony: objectivity, universality, and necessity. Better understanding what “thinking algorithmically” entails, and the forms of knowing and acting that it affords and excludes, is vital, we argue, to begin naming the political implications and transformative potential of new forms of climate governance.
Metagenomics is a segment of conventional microbial genomics dedicated to the sequencing and analysis of combined genomic DNA of entire environmental samples. The most critical step of the metagenomic data analysis is the reconstruction of individual genes and genomes of the microorganisms in the communities using metagenomic assemblers – computational programs that put together small fragments of sequenced DNA generated by sequencing instruments. Here, we describe the challenges of metagenomic assembly, a wide spectrum of applications in which metagenomic assemblies were used to better understand the ecology and evolution of microbial ecosystems, and present one of the most efficient microbial assemblers, SPAdes that was upgraded to become applicable for metagenomics.
Social media data are being increasingly used in conservation science to study human–nature interactions. User‐generated content, such as images, video, text, and audio, and the associated metadata can be used to assess such interactions. A number of social media platforms provide free access to user‐generated social media content. However, similar to any research involving people, scientific investigations based on social media data require compliance with highest standards of data privacy and data protection, even when data are publicly available. Should social media data be misused, the risks to individual users' privacy and well‐being can be substantial. We investigated the legal basis for using social media data while ensuring data subjects’ rights through a case study based on the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. The risks associated with using social media data in research include accidental and purposeful misidentification that has the potential to cause psychological or physical harm to an identified person. To collect, store, protect, share, and manage social media data in a way that prevents potential risks to users involved, one should minimize data, anonymize data, and follow strict data management procedure. Risk‐based approaches, such as a data privacy impact assessment, can be used to identify and minimize privacy risks to social media users, to demonstrate accountability and to comply with data protection legislation. We recommend that conservation scientists carefully consider our recommendations in devising their research objectives so as to facilitate responsible use of social media data in conservation science research, for example, in conservation culturomics and investigations of illegal wildlife trade online.
Natural history documentaries are a globally important source of information about wildlife, conservation and environmental issues, and they are the closest many will get to seeing featured animals and their behaviour in the wild. They are entertainment, certainly, but may also inform people's knowledge of the natural world and influence their ideas on conservation of species and habitats. We locate our perspective in the existing literature analysing wildlife documentary making and its effects.
We argue that a conspicuous pre‐occupation with the ‘personalisation’ of individual animals and the injection of false jeopardy in recent wildlife documentaries leads to significant misinformation and creates problems for public understanding of wider conservation.
We illustrate our point by detailing episodes from the BBC natural history series Dynasties, discussing personalisation, anthropomorphism and the use of jeopardy to gain emotive impact and audience engagement. We find that narratives are framed around a single individual, that ‘stories’ are framed as soap operas, that jeopardy is emphasised throughout and that animals are endowed with the capacity to be aware of, and work towards, the dynasties of the title.
With conservation increasingly relying on public support, we argue that it is important that people are presented with factually correct information, and portraying wild animals as soap opera style characters is neither honest nor helpful.
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In this essay, I consider the scales and connections lost and gained as natural history adopts digital data infrastructures. On the basis of ongoing work in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, I track the relations between insect specimens and their material and digital informational ecologies. Using Latour's notion of the ‘circulating reference’, I follow the insect specimens as they make their way into taxonomies, databases, and digitization apparatuses. In focusing on human-data mediations in museum practices of ordering, describing, and distributing specimens, I show how the datafication of nature makes present conventionally dissociated contexts, including German colonialism. Proposing the concept of a data formation, I suggest that ethnographers have much to contribute in bringing forward the sociocultural and historical specificities and contingencies within data.
Wildlife conservation and research benefits enormously from automated and interconnected monitoring tools. Some of these tools, such as drones, remote cameras, and social media, can collect data on humans, either accidentally or deliberately. They can therefore be thought of as conservation surveillance technologies (CSTs). There is increasing evidence that CSTs, and the data they yield, can have both positive and negative impacts on people, raising ethical questions about how to use them responsibly. CST use may accelerate because of the COVID-19 pandemic, adding urgency to addressing these ethical challenges. We propose a provisional set of principles for the responsible use of such tools and their data: (a) recognize and acknowledge CSTs can have social impacts; (b) deploy CSTs based on necessity and proportionality relative to the conservation problem; (c) evaluate all potential impacts of CSTs on people; (d) engage with and seek consent from people who may be observed and/or affected by CSTs; (e) build transparency and accountability into CST use; (f) respect peoples' rights and vulnerabilities; and (g) protect data in order to safeguard privacy. These principles require testing and could conceivably benefit conservation efforts, especially through inclusion of people likely to be affected by CSTs.
This article develops a wider ontology of infrastructure. It argues that infrastructures not only hasten the flow of materials but produce non-human mobilities and immobilities that radically alter the dynamics of life. Infrastructures become a medium of life as natural and infrastructural ecologies meld, reorienting notions of design, architecture, planning and governance. Non-human life itself can be cast as infrastructure, with biopolitical implications for anticipating and managing the future. An infrastructural ontology moving beyond anthropocentric familiars generates new analytics and critical openings for the politics of governing human and non-human life.
This is a study of the material life of information and its devices; of electronic waste in its physical and electronic incarnations; a cultural and material mapping of the spaces where electronics in the form of both hardware and information accumulate, break down, or are stowed away. Electronic waste occurs not just in the form of discarded computers but also as a scatter of information devices, software, and systems that are rendered obsolete and fail. Where other studies have addressed "digital" technology through a focus on its immateriality or virtual qualities, Gabrys traces the material, spatial, cultural, and political infrastructures that enable the emergence and dissolution of these technologies. In the course of her book, she explores five interrelated "spaces" where electronics fall apart: from Silicon Valley to Nasdaq, from containers bound for China to museums and archives that preserve obsolete electronics as cultural artifacts, to the landfill as material repository. All together, these sites stack up into a sedimentary record that forms the "natural history" of this study. Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics describes the materiality of electronics from a unique perspective, examining the multiple forms of waste that electronics create as evidence of the resources, labor, and imaginaries that are bundled into these machines. By drawing on the material analysis developed by Walter Benjamin, this natural history method allows for an inquiry into electronics that focuses neither on technological progression nor on great inventors but rather considers the ways in which electronic technologies fail and decay. Ranging across studies of media and technology, as well as environments, geography, and design, Jennifer Gabrys pulls together the far-reaching material and cultural processes that enable the making and breaking of these technologies. Jennifer Gabrys is Senior Lecturer in Design and Convener of the Masters in Design and Environment in the Department of Design, Goldsmiths, University of London. Jacket image: Computer dump ©iStockphoto/Lya_Cattel. digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.
Taking as his case-study the city of Guayaquil in Ecuador, where 600,000 people lack easy access to potable water, Erik Swyngedouw aims to reconstruct, theoretically and empirically, the political, social, and economic conduits through which water flows, and to identify how power relations infuse the metabolic transformation of water as it becomes urban. These flows of water which are simultaneously physical and social carry in their currents the embodiment of myriad social struggles and conflicts. The excavation of these flows narrates stories about the city's structure and development. Yet these flows also carry the potential for an improved, more just, and more equitable right to the city and its water. The flows of power that are captured by urban water circulation also suggest that the question of urban sustainability is not just about achieving sound ecological and environmental conditions, but first and foremost about a social struggle for access and control; a struggle not just for the right to water, but for the right to the city itself.
Drones with night vision are tracking elephant and rhino poachers in African wildlife parks and sanctuaries; smart submersibles are saving coral from carnivorous starfish on Australia's Great Barrier Reef; recycled cell phones alert Brazilian forest rangers to the sound of illegal logging. The tools of artificial intelligence are being increasingly deployed in the battle for global sustainability. And yet, warns Peter Dauvergne, we should be cautious in declaring AI the planet's savior. In AI in the Wild, Dauvergne avoids the AI industry-powered hype and offers a critical view, exploring both the potential benefits and risks of using artificial intelligence to advance global sustainability.
Dauvergne finds that corporations and states often use AI in ways that are antithetical to sustainability. The competition to profit from AI is entrenching technocratic management, revving up resource extraction, and turbocharging consumption, as consumers buy new smart devices (and discard their old, less-smart ones). Smart technology is helping farmers grow crops more efficiently, but also empowering the agrifood industry. Moreover, states are weaponizing AI to control citizens, suppress dissent, and aim cyberattacks at rival states.
Is there a way to harness the power of AI for environmental and social good? Dauvergne argues for precaution and humility as guiding principles in the deployment of AI.
Microbial molecules from soil, seawater and human bodies are among the planet’s least understood. Microbial molecules from soil, seawater and human bodies are among the planet’s least understood.
Sensors are increasingly present in our environments and technologies. At the same time, environmental sensing is a set of practices meant to provide more information on environmental change, while enabling new forms of environmental citizenship. Program Earth documents and discusses the ways in which new environments and citizen-sensing practices are emerging along with environmental sensing technologies. Through discussing specific instances where sensors are deployed for environmental study and citizen engagement across three areas of environmental sensing, from wild sensing to pollution sensing and urban sensing, Program Earth asks how sensor technologies are generating distinct ways of programming environments and environmental relations. What are the implications for wiring up environments in these ways? How do sensor applications not only program environments, but also program the sorts of citizens and collectives we might become? Working across digital media theory, science and technology studies, and environmental studies, Program Earth takes up these questions to examine the distinct environments, exchanges, and entities that take hold through these sensorized projects. This study develops the concept of the becoming environmental of computation in order to map the ways in which sensors are used to understand ecological processes, to track the migration of animals, to monitor pollutants, to facilitate urban participation, and to program infrastructure. Through these examples, Program Earth suggests that the programming of Earth yields processes for making new environments not necessarily as an extension of humans, but rather as new “techno-geographies” that emerge across technologies, people, practices, and more-than-human entities.
How does the digitization of the ocean reconfigure capitalist, colonial, and environmental relations? What analytic tools allow us to trace their intersecting dynamics? These are the central questions that we take up through an examination of smart oceans governance along the west coast of Canada, where the state is developing new institutional partnerships in order to manage the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure across unceded Indigenous lands and waters. In this context, one laden with environmental risks and resurgent anti‐colonial politics, state actors are implicating smart oceans governance in efforts to harmonise capitalist growth with sustainability mandates and the “recognition” of Indigenous self‐determination. Our analysis combines environmental state theory, critical indigenous studies, and human geographies of the ocean and draws on interviews, Access to Information requests, scientific studies, and policy reports. Our findings suggest that smart oceans governance poses novel risks to Indigenous peoples and their distinctive “seascape epistemologies.” At the same time, we observe in this medium new limits to the state's ability to consolidate settler colonial authority and extend possessive colonial entitlements to Indigenous lands and waters. First Nations are also engaging with smart oceans governance in ways that assert “Indigenous data sovereignty”, help chart their own political and territorial ambitions, and carve out meaningful spaces of Indigenous marine stewardship.
This paper offers a detailed empirical account of how human‐environment relations were reconfigured in the UK and Ireland during the 2020‐2021 COVID‐19 lockdowns, a period which natural scientists defined as the COVID‐19 Anthropause. Bringing this scientific concept into conversation with geographical work, we consider the lived experiences of anthropause as both a lived condition and an historical moment of space‐time decompression. Our expanded conceptualisation of anthropause brings it into everyday life and develops a more hopeful politics than those offered by the ‘Great Acceleration’ narrative, which suggests digital media and urbanisation separate humans from nature. In contrast, we identify affirmative and inclusive modes of 'anthropause environmentalism' and explore their potential for fostering convivial human‐nature relations in a world that is increasingly urban, digital, and powered by vernacular expertise. To make this argument, we turn to the Self‐Isolating Bird Club, an online birdwatching community operating across several social media platforms which, at the pandemic’s height, reached over fifty thousand members. We trace three key changes to human‐nature relations illustrated by this group which we use to structure our paper: connection, community, and cultivation. The COVID‐19 Anthropause recalibrated the fabric and rhythms of everyday life, changing what counts as a meaningful human‐nature relationship. This paper will be of interest to geographers exploring environmental change at the interface of more‐than‐human and digital geographies, as well as environmentalists and conservationists. To conclude, we offer suggestions as to how scholars and practitioners might harness the lessons of anthropause to prepare for the coming ‘anthropulse’.
Humans, nonhuman animals, and technologies are increasingly entangled. Using the peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) as an illustrative example, we propose ‘technonatural history’ as a theoretical and methodological approach for observing, describing, and examining the role technologies play in shaping human relations with other species. After nearing extinction in the 20th century, peregrines have become woven into the fabric of everyday urban life and are a frequently sighted urban raptor in the UK, nesting on high‐rise buildings and church spires since the late 1990s. Their unexpected presence in cities symbolises hope for multispecies conviviality amidst the contemporary ecological crisis. As their populations resurged, crucially, webcam and livestreaming technologies developed rapidly. Peregrines were one of the first animals to be broadcast over the internet via ‘nestcams’, granting broad publics access to their intimate lives. We examine the related technological histories of livestreaming technologies and natural histories of peregrine falcons in the UK, tracing the emergence of ‘the digital peregrine’ and its manifold implications for more‐than‐human and digital geographies. To do so, we build upon oral history interviews with people associated with digital peregrines throughout the UK: nestcam technicians, peregrine conservationists, professional ecologists, activists, and citizen scientists. Whilst digitisation brings broad publics closer to these cosmopolitan raptors, they can only ever grasp at the wildness of peregrine falcons and their wider milieus as the digital peregrine encounter is a distinct entity with its own sets of affects and affordances. In the peregrine’s case, digital technologies create unexpected and radical opportunities for urban conviviality, signalling the positive potentials for technologies in forging meaningful more‐than‐human connections.
Despite an exponential increase in Internet use, only minimal consideration of digital technologies in sustainability and urban planning tends to occur within institutions. Further, discourses and practices relating to sustainability, digital technologies and urban planning rarely include consideration of the environmental impacts of digital technology use and data production and storage. This paper examines how an urban university in Australia, the University of Sydney, is attempting to address sustainability issues and to what extent digital technologies are included within that setting. Drawing on interviews with the leads on a sustainability project at the university, a survey of students, scholars and affiliates, and, observations of the institution, this research offers a case study of how digital technologies sit within a current sustainability planning process. Key themes that emerge from this research include lack of visibility of digital technologies as a part of the infrastructure that universities need, as well as assumptions that digital technologies are included in sustainability strategies by default. Urban planners and university managers may respond to these findings by addressing partial sustainability strategies and poor management of escalating digital technological usage.
As we enter what scientists are calling the 6th mass extinction of life on this planet, we are forced to confront the prospect of a future world without animals. Despite the disappearance of ‘real’ animals in the wake of global ecocatastrophe however, animals proliferate in the ‘Anthropocene’ imaginary, and in particular, through contemporary video games as they reimagine the future relationship of humans and animal life increasingly withdrawn from the lives of humans. The animal imagined in video games herein serves not only to re-join the animal to a culture that has no more room for nature, but to preserve the animal as a sign of our status and significance on a rapidly changing planet. Herein, the surgical remaking of animals within video games constitutes an augury on the future status of the animal and the preservation of its existence via simulation, where it is yet made to labor in the psychical models of liberalism and humanism intimate to the conceits of Anthropocene thinking. Drawing largely from the scholarship of Jean Baudrillard (1994) and his developments on the transmutation of animals from ontological equal to hyperreal companion, this essay will analyze a number of contemporary video games (e.g. Fallout, the Outer Worlds) in which hyperreal animal companions are prominently featured. Following, the essay will aim to articulate the hyperreal reformatting of animality as both an index of our contemporary relationship with non-humans and as a mode of responding to the threat of extinction in the Anthropocene era.
In recent years, a range of new and existing monitoring technologies have been developed or redeployed for the practice of conservation. These include the use of drones, camera traps, and satellite and thermal imagery for activities such as anti-poaching and law enforcement. These technologies bring exciting new technical capabilities for conservation, but they also raise social concerns related to privacy and pervasive surveillance. Without proper consultation and dialogue with local communities, it has been suggested that the use of such technologies may lead to marginalization, interstakeholder tensions, and ultimately strain the relationship between conservation agencies, local communities, and even local authorities. In many respects surveillance is constitutive of modern society, especially in urban spaces. The social implications of surveillance have been heavily researched and discussed in that context, but the application of surveillance technologies in conservation and environmental management and its impacts remain an underexplored field of inquiry. This chapter aims to explore and understand the complexities that lie behind using surveillance technologies for conservation. It argues that these digital technologies are not a panacea for all conservation-related problems and need careful review before, during, and after use. The chapter also argues that it is important to consider who controls, benefits from, and pays for these technologies. Finally, the chapter calls for comprehensive ethical guidelines and frameworks of regulation that promote democratization of these technologies.
‘Data is the new oil’ is a phrase that is frequently employed to indicate that digital technologies and data extraction have supplanted fossil fuels and geological extractivism as the central driver of the global economy. While this metaphor has been subject to discursive and ideological critique within media, communication and cultural studies, this article conducts a materialist analysis of the connections between data and oil. While claims that data is the new oil typically assume digital technologies to be clean, renewable and sustainable, an infrastructural approach reveals the vast quantities of oil and other fossil fuels necessary for digital capitalism, therefore repudiating claims that data can grow exponentially with no material costs. Consequently, the article explores how metabolic rifts and degrowth offer productive frameworks for outlining the contours of a sustainable and equitable digital future.
This article examines the generation of digital outer space natures in the space exploration game, No Man’s Sky. Using procedural generation, No Man’s Sky offers nearly infinite planets, flora, and fauna on the fly. With the rapid development of gaming technology and tools, game developers and others are attempting to diversify the representation of various forms of nature in gaming content and to expand the use of games in behavioral change, education, conservation, and other fields. Many scholars argue that games offer promising ways for various publics to understand their place and their interconnectedness with microbes, ecosystems, planet Earth, and beyond. We examine how No Man’s Sky struggled to coproduce digital outer space natures at the two scalar extremes of the vast expanse of outer space and of the embodied player relating within complex biomes. Our results from an in-depth, qualitative analysis of the initial version of the game, of player world-building experiences in No Man’s Sky, and of subsequent developer modifications to the game demonstrate that nonscalability theory is useful for studying what digital outer space natures do in games. We also argue that nonscalability theory would benefit from a more robust engagement with the digital. No Man’s Sky was initially scalable to such an extreme that it made players into objects without an origin story, broader purpose or way to build meaningful relations in the game. For a brief period, this game undermined players’ interplanetary colonial imaginaries. Subsequent updates to the game introduced a limited scope of nonscalability, but only to the extent of satisfying gamers’ desires to become more impactful agents of exploration. We see great potential for analyzing the role of innovations in computing and game design in linking multiscalar digital, outer, and earth spaces, which as other scholars have shown, bear significantly on our understanding of multiple worlds and natures.
The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's proliferation of animals in digital networks.
From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures.
Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic, and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.