The limits of Anthropocene narratives

Simon, Zoltán Boldizsár

doi:10.1177/1368431018799256

Cited by 29 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…He notes how the genuinely new challenges posed by the Anthropocene tend to be domesticated by existing ways of thinking: [O]n the one hand, we tend to think of the Anthropocene as the radical event, rupture, and unprecedented change that rewrites disciplinary codes as we know them and demands new arrangements of knowledge we are yet to establish; on the other, we still think about our radically new predicament in terms of our more familiar arrangements of knowledge. (Simon 2018, p. 11)…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The cost of music

Brennan

Devine

2020

Pop. Mus.

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What is the cost of music in the so-called Anthropocene? We approach this question by focusing on the case of sound-recording formats. We consider the cost of recorded music through two overlapping lenses: economic cost, on the one hand, and environmental cost, on the other. The article begins by discussing how the price of records has changed from the late 19th to the 21st century and across the seven most economically significant playback formats: phonograph cylinder, gramophone disc, vinyl LP, cassette tape, compact disc, digital audio files on hard drive, and streaming from the cloud. Our case study territory is the United States, and we chart the gradual decline in the price of recorded music up to the present. We then examine the environmental and human costs of music by looking at what recordings are made out of, where those materials come from, and what happens to them when they are disposed of. Despite what rhetorics of digital dematerialisation tell us, we show that the labour conditions in the digital electronics and IT industries are as inhumane as ever, while the amount of greenhouse gases released by the US recording industry could actually be higher today than at the height of any previous format. We conclude by asking the obvious (but by no means straightforward) question: what are musicians and fans to do?

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The cost of music

Brennan

Devine

2020

Pop. Mus.

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“…However, there is a growing interest in exploring the Anthropocene from new perspectives related to communication and media studies. For instance, research on information infrastructure (Dedeoglu and Ekmekcioglu 2020), social media and the Anthropocene (Gärdebo et al 2017), projects on children's media use (Livingstone and Blum-Ross 2020) and their relationship with technology in the context of the Anthropocene (Kraftl et al 2020) or, more broadly, studying the narrative frames as key for the construction of possible representations of the Anthropocene (Lidskog and Waterton 2018;Simon 2020), be them dystopian or-maybe more desirably-hopeful and utopian (Arias-Maldonado 2019). These future research initiatives, together with the rest of the efforts outlined in this article, acknowledge the importance of communication science and media studies in the challenge of not only making sense, but also making meaning of the Anthropocene.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Approaches to the Anthropocene from Communication and Media Studies

Bergillos

2021

Social Sciences

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This paper explores how communication and media studies have engaged with the concept of the Anthropocene in recent years. The purpose of this study is to outline the most relevant theoretical and conceptual contributions from communication science and media studies to issues related to climate change, global sustainability and the Anthropocene. A literature review on the matter shows that the field of communication research is diverse and heterogeneous, and that it puts forward different concepts and theories that deal with media as the environment or the environment as media. Environmental communication and environmental humanities frame approaches to media representations of environmental issues, whereas elemental analysis focuses on the essence of media, its material dimensions and its entanglements with social practices. From the dialogue and interdisciplinary debates among these disciplines, new approaches such as environmental media studies arise. Differences among theories have to do with the definition of media or the consideration of humanity in relation to nature or technology. In sum, communication and media studies offer interdisciplinary approaches and a nuanced understanding of our socio-natural relations, which will become more and more mediated in the years to come.

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“…Simon describes the Anthropocene as an unprecedented event, a rupture between previous experience and expectations for the future, and, as such, it cannot be narrated. He explains that we can construct a continuous story about how it happened but cannot grasp the Anthropocene itself and its consequences, because it is a radically new phenomenon (see Simon 2015Simon , 2017Simon , 2020. I assume that the main consequence of such historical sensitivity is the impossibility of closing the story, which therefore provides neither the full meaning of the representation of the past nor a lesson from the past for the reader.…”

Section: A Response By a Theory Of Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Anthropocene Contract. What Kind of Historian–Reader Agreement Does Environmental Historiography Need?

Muchowski

2022

Perspectives on Public Policy in Societal-Environmental Crises

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The paper is an attempt to reply to the question on how environmental history can participate in public debates on contemporary world concerns in a reliable and socially relevant way. I argue that the answer to this question lies in environmental history's reading pact, which I call the Anthropocene contract. Its most important element is the principle of equality, which concerns the relationship between historians and their readers. In the first step, I invoke Graeme Wynn's statement to point to important questions about the challenges that the Anthropocene posed to environmental history. Next I critically discuss the answers to these questions provided by historical theory. I then formulate a proposal for a reading pact of environmental history using the theoretical insights of Kalle Pihlainen and the philosophy of Jacques Rancière.

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The limits of Anthropocene narratives

Cited by 29 publications

References 39 publications

The cost of music

The cost of music

Approaches to the Anthropocene from Communication and Media Studies

The Anthropocene Contract. What Kind of Historian–Reader Agreement Does Environmental Historiography Need?

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