Media Matters: Material and Environmental Consequences

DIGI30071 Media Matters: Material and Environmental Consequences 20 Semester 1 Undergraduate Level 3 1 FHEQ level (Framework for Higher Education Qualifications) ' Last part of a Bachelors ' European Credit Transfer & Accumulation System Rating : 10.0 What are media made out of? Where do they come from, and where do they go? The components that comprise them, the data that flows through them, and the power that sustains them all come with consequences. In other words, media are thoroughly material – from the glass that makes up our touchscreens, and the silicon that comprises our chips, to the lithium that sustains our rechargeable batteries. This course unit will offer students the opportunity to explore, trace, and investigate the myriad material costs, cultures, and connections that sustain our contemporary digital world. Although ordinarily, ideally, conveniently or suspiciously out of sight, these material demands rely on a truly global ecology, from cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo to data centres in Sweden, and from chipfabs in Taiwan to e-waste sites in India. This course unit will equip students with the tools and techniques to map out these connections, drawing on methods employed across media studies, geography/environmental studies, and anthropology to study the materiality of contemporary media.    What are media made out of? Where do they come from, and where do they go? The components that comprise them, the data that flows through them, and the power that sustains them all come with consequences. In other words, media are thoroughly material – from the glass that makes up our touchscreens, and the silicon that comprises our chips, to the lithium that sustains our rechargeable batteries. This course unit will offer students the opportunity to explore, trace, and investigate the myriad material costs, cultures, and connections that sustain our contemporary digital world. Although ordinarily, ideally, conveniently or suspiciously out of sight, these material demands rely on a truly global ecology, from cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo to data centres in Sweden, and from chipfabs in Taiwan to e-waste sites in India. This course unit will equip students with the tools and techniques to map out these connections, drawing on methods employed across media studies, geography/environmental studies, and anthropology to study the materiality of contemporary media.    The unit aims to:<ul><li>introduce students to the material and ecological connections that build and sustain our digital worlds</li><li>offer students opportunities to experiment with methodological techniques to study and examine material and ecological connections related to digital media</li><li>provide global and situated case studies and examples of the material and ecological elements of how digital technologies are made, sustained, and disposed of</li></ul> <ul><li>Articulate how digital media and technology are reliant on material and ecological conditions</li><li>Examine where and how digital technologies are manufactured, assembled, sustained, and destroyed or recycled</li><li>Identify how material connections and components that underpin digital media have significant costs and consequences</li></ul> <ul><li>Critically analyse the material and ecological effects of particular digital technologies and associated practices</li><li>Compare how different digital technologies and systems rely on unique material and ecological connections</li><li>Employ concepts drawn from prior studies to evaluate the materiality of media</li></ul> <ul><li>Justify novel creative approaches to represent the lifecycles of digital media objects and platforms</li><li>Develop digital visual and cartographic skills to produce visually-stimulating and pedagogically-useful outputs</li><li>Hone acquired methodological skills to source and critically appraise material on ecological features of digital media  </li></ul> <ul><li>Account for contingent and speculative elements of analytical work</li><li>Develop scripting, presentation and editing skills to compose material for lay audiences</li><li>Conduct an empirically-grounded research project  </li></ul> The course unit is divided into three parts focused on the ‘life cycle’ of digital media and technology: making, using, and destroying. In the ‘making’ part of the unit students will consider the manufacture and assembly of digital media/technologies, including how raw materials are sourced and extracted from around the world, how economic supply-chains are vital for such manufacturing, and how labour is variously demanded and relied upon. In the ‘using’ part of the unit, students will explore the material and ecological costs of ‘keeping the lights on’: how (e.g.) data centres, cloud infrastructures, bitcoin mining, and machine learning require huge resources of energy to do what they do. In the ‘destroying’ part of the unit, students will consider how – and importantly, where – digital media and technologies die, and what happens when they reach the end of their life. Throughout, the unit offers an ecological, and global approach to studying the materiality of media, making use of case studies throughout the world. In addition, it offers students the possibility to experiment with a range of methodological approaches – from device repair to supply-chain mapping – to interrogate and trace these ecological aspects.   The unit consists of 1-hour lectures and 2-hour seminars per week, delivered synchronously and in-person.Lectures will broadly trace the aforementioned ‘life cycle’ of digital media and technology. Opening weeks will introduce different extractive processes, extraction locations, and raw materials integral to the manufacture of different digital technologies. Middle weeks will introduce the sites, systems, and infrastructures deemed necessary to maintain the ordinary running of such technologies. Later weeks will focus on how digital devices and technologies are disposed of, destroyed, or recycled. Each lecture will make use of interactive media in the forms of digital maps, journalistic accounts, and video excerpts (fiction/non-fiction) to convey these material and ecological connections.Seminars will involve group discussion of key readings, and a range of practical activities. The latter will typically involve exploratory, diagrammatic, visual, and cartographic tracing and connecting of different elements, actors, processes, and systems involved in the lifecycles of different kinds of digital media and technologies. Activities will also involve students sourcing, comparing, and evaluating different kinds of policy documents and technical papers pertaining to the material and ecological nature of the manufacture, use, and disposal of digital objects. Activities might also involve students experimenting with different ways to calculate, quantify, and qualify the material and environmental costs of digital processes, transactions, and functions in order to establish benchmarks for how to evaluate their consequences. In addition, students might also have the opportunity to conduct ‘teardowns’, in which they dismantle ordinary digital devices (phones, laptops, printers) in order to trace the material connections of the components inside. 0 Other 100% <figure class="table"><table><tbody><tr><td>Assessment task</td><td>Weighting within unit (if relevant)</td></tr><tr><td>Project pitch (individual)</td><td>0%</td></tr><tr><td>Project video short (individual)</td><td>50%</td></tr><tr><td>Media lifecycle project (individual)</td><td>50%</td></tr></tbody></table></figure> Written, via Blackboard/Turnitin, within 15 working days N Campbell, P., Dempsey, H. and Davies, C. (2023) The search for winners in the new battery era. Financial Times. Available: https://www.ft.com/content/34c6c191-a803-495a-938d-e1328d53d77c  Critical Carbon Computing Collective (2023) Introducing Carbon Computing. Branch. Available: https://branch.climateaction.tech/issues/issue-5/introducing-carbon-computing/  Cubitt, S., Palmer, D. and Tkacz, N. (2014) (eds.) Digital Light. London: Open Humanities Press. Fuller, M. (2007) Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gabrys, J. (2011) Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Hu, T-H. (2016) A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jue, M. and Ruiz, R. (2021) (eds.) Saturation: An Elemental Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Parks, L. and Starosielski, N. (2015) Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Parikka, J. (2015) A Geology of Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Peters, J. D. (2015) The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Starosielski, N. (2022) Media Hot and Cold. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stoll, C., Klaaßen, L. and Gallersdörfer, U. (2019) The carbon footprint of Bitcoin. Joule 3 (7): 1647-1661. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2019.05.012  Velkova, J. and Plantin, J-C. (2023) Special issue: Data centers and the infrastructural temporalities of digital media. New Media & Society 25 (2): 273-448. https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/nmsa/25/2    Lectures 11 Tutorials 22 0 167