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.

Keeping time with digital technologies: From real-time environments to forest futurisms

“…Realtimeness emphasises speed, immediacy, instantaneity, and a sense of unmediated encounter, and is shaped by specific devices, infrastructures, and practices that ‘pace’ the interplay between computation and experience in the temporal unfolding of data (Lupinacci, 2022; Wajcman, 2015 ; Weltevrede et al., 2014). Realtimeness increasingly organises ‘digital ecologies’ (Turnbull et al., 2023), from forest monitoring networks and data infrastructures (Gabrys, 2022; Zweifel et al., 2023) to mediated human–nonhuman encounters through livestreams and mobile apps (Kamphof, 2013; Westerlaken et al., 2023).…”

Techno-genesis: Reconceptualising geography’s technology from ontology to ontogenesis

“…Clearly, anglophone geography has long engaged with the agencies of the digital – particularly in the way that quantitative geographical information system sciences have for decades treated digital technologies as ‘tools for environmental management’ (Wilbanks, 2004: 5) and as a ‘vehicle for new levels of sophistication and innovation in framing geographical research questions’ (Higgitt, 2008: 2). One way geography’s recent turn to the digital gains some specificity, however, is in examining how the remaking of geographical knowledge through digital technologies has a number of political consequences (Maalsen, 2023) – such as in connection to smart city governance (Kitchin et al, 2015; Das and Zhang, 2021), public activism (Datta, 2018; McLean, 2020), and environmental governance (Machen and Nost, 2021; Turnbull et al, 2022). To understand this, Datta’s (2018) work on postcolonial urbanism is notable.…”

“…Writing at the intersection of new materialist, feminist, and speculative philosophies, Engelmann et al (2022: 238) develops how a community-led satellite imaging network – open-weather – offers ways to understand how ‘alternative earth-images can mediate local conditions, express uneven relationships to environments, and facilitate moments of intimacy between strangers’. This focus on how digital technologies participate in the production of political collectives (Taffel, 2019) concerns at once the role of technologies in reshaping how the human relates to various techno-geographical milieux (Gabrys, 2016) and also the capacities of technologies to offer alternative forms of sense and experience through certain forms of digital entanglement (Turnbull et al, 2022: 18-21).…”

“…This recent attention to the technological production of spacetimes can be seen as a continuation of a wider effort to articulate how technologies enact specific kinds of affective powers distinct to human interaction (Ash et al, 2018a; McLean, 2020; Pink and Fors, 2017; Thrift, 2005). Such engagements with the capacities of technology to affect the consistency of thought and subjectivity take on a wider socio-technical significance by contributing ways to understand the agency of spatial media to structure the thresholds of human perception in quite abstract, yet politically motivated, ways (Lally, 2017; Elwood and Leszczynski, 2013; Turnbull et al, 2022).…”

Time to stop playing

“…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.…”