ABSTRACT

Mediating Nature considers how technology acts as a mediating device in the construction and circulation of images that inform how we see and know nature. Scholarship in environmental communication has focused almost exclusively on verbal rather than visual rhetoric, and this book engages ecocritical and ecocompositional inquiry to shift focus onto the making of images.

Contributors to this dynamic collection focus their efforts on the intersections of digital media and environmental/ecological thinking. Part of the book’s larger argument is that analysis of mediations of nature must develop more critical tools of analysis toward the very mediating technologies that produce such media. That is, to truly understand mediations of nature, one needs to understand the creation and production of those mediations, right down to the algorithms, circuit boards, and power sources that drive mediating technologies.

Ultimately, Mediating Nature contends that ecological literacy and environmental politics are inseparable from digital literacies and visual rhetorics. The book will be of interest to scholars and students working in the fields of Ecocriticism, Ecocomposition, Media Ecology, Visual Rehtoric, and Digital Literacy Studies.

chapter 1|14 pages

Mediating interfaces

Getting in between
BySidney I. Dobrin, Sean Morey

chapter 2|15 pages

Ecoplay

The rhetorics of games about nature
ByMelissa Bianchi

chapter 3|16 pages

Visualizing ecocritical euphoria in Red Dead Redemption 2

BySteve Holmes

chapter 4|20 pages

Stereoscopic rhetorics

Model environments, 3D technologies, and decolonizing data collection
ByShannon Butts

chapter 5|13 pages

If a tree falls

Mediations into and of natural sound
ByJoe Marshall Hardin

chapter 6|17 pages

(Re)placing the rhetoric of scale

Ecoliteracy, networked writing, and MEmorial mapping
ByMadison Jones

chapter 7|13 pages

Imagining the Eastern Garbage Patch

Ocean plastics as a problem of representation and scale
ByDan Brayton

chapter 8|20 pages

Meaning in the growing, the harvest, the weaving, the making

Indigenous technologies at Plimoth Plantation’s Wampanoag Homesite
ByLisa King

chapter 9|16 pages

Translating nature

Manipulation of natural landscape in contemporary digital photography
ByAnastasia Kozak

chapter 10|10 pages

(Re)coding environmental activism

An examination of Hike Wild Montana
ByGlen Southergill

chapter 11|15 pages

I See the Body Electrate

ByJason Crider