This is my first post on the Ecomedia Studies blog, so I thought I’d dive in with some ruminations on the environmental footprint of virtual worlds like Second Life (SL). Yes, I know SL is troughing on the hype curve these days, but I think it’s too early to write off that particular platform, given the rising popularity of its opensource alternative OpenSim as well as recurrent predictions that the future WWW will be a three-dimensional one (take a look at ExitReality sometime if you want to get a feel for how that might work).
I’m a doctoral candidate in Environmental Communication here at Florida State, and my dissertation will address the way virtual worlds reinscribe (or possibly challenge) ideas about Nature. SL is an instance of “virtual reality” or, more specifically, a “multiuser virtual environment” in which users interact within a persistent three-dimensional virtual space and are represented by more or less anthropomorphic avatars. It resembles massively multiplayer online roleplaying games like World of Warcraft in its ability to reflect human fantasy in a convincing virtual world, but SL has no gameplay conditions, so it’s better thought of as a social medium than a game.
SL is also set of material, cultural, and social practices circulating around a service provided by a California company called Linden Lab (LL). The company was founded in 1999 by Philip Rosedale, who gained prestige and financial clout following a stint as chief technical officer at Real Networks, a pioneer in online video streaming. Rosedale was joined by former executives from such new-media players as Electronic Arts, eBay, Disney, Adobe, and Apple, and within ten years the company had grown to about 250 employees at its San Francisco headquarters and satellite locations. Recent economic downturns have cut that workforce to about half that size.
Although it is more of a social network than a game, the appeal and visual appearance of SL are clearly related to video games and MMORPGs. These in turn have been driven by advances in computer graphics and inexpensive processing power, as well as the amount of free time available to affluent adolescents and young adults. Thus SL is only possible in an economy with plentiful leisure time and disposable income. Furthermore, SL accelerates problems of waste disposal by requiring advanced processing and graphical capabilities that encourage early disposal and replacement of computer hardware.
The technical infrastructure of SL’s servers and the client-side computers of its thousands of users have material costs, some of which are externalized and nearly invisible from marketing materials and coverage in the business press. According to anthropologist Tom Boellstorff, the data residing on SL servers represents 50 times the information contained in the entire United States Library of Congress. Like all Internet services, SL relies on basic industrial processes whereby minerals and petroleum products are extracted and modified, under at times unknown conditions in overseas markets, then through a capitalist process of wealth flow, consumed in affluent societies. Linden Lab has never been explicitly connected with sweatshop conditions, or scandals like the suicides of Chinese factory workers in the Apple iPhone production chain, but the company operates within a modern global capitalist high-technology market that includes such abuses. Cheap and ubiquitous computing requires a certain degree of cheap labor, a fact that isn’t appended to every Twitter post or Facebook update like the warnings on cigarette packs.
The production of computer hardware and its employment also has health and environmental impacts. Longterm computer use results in physiological effects (such as vision impairments and carpal tunnel syndrome) as well as psychological effects from immersion, e.g. so-called Internet addiction. The servers also require a significant amount of electrical energy, which tends to come from nonrenewable and carbon-producing sources (see smonani’s post here, The hungry internet, as well as Peter Arnfalk’s keynote on “Greening IT†delivered at IR11, for more general issues about the ecological footprint of our electronic media). Although there has as yet been no detailed analysis of SL’s carbon footprint, blogger Nicholas Carr famously conducted a back-of-napkin calculation that put the energy consumption of a Second Life avatar at roughly equivalent to that of a citizen of Brazil (the real-life one). That a virtual human can consume more energy than a real one in an industrialized nation like Brazil only highlights the inequalities that SL can reproduce.
LL are aware of environmental concerns, appealing to augmentationists by arguing that reduced needs for travel and physical plants results in “Green Learning”:
“Taking care of the environment by reducing our carbon footprint is no longer a nice idea — it’s a mandate for businesses, governments, and educational institutions from around the world. By reducing the need for travel and meeting in a virtual classroom, schools can save millions of carbon pounds from entering our environment. Although virtual worlds require energy to power computers and servers, the environmental impact is minimal by comparison. Intel recently published a case study on Second Life data centers and validated that claim.”
There is even an independent service within Second Life that allows one to purchase carbon offsetting credits for one’s use of the virtual environment. But while environmental-advocacy groups have availed themselves of SL as a tool for meeting, community building, social marketing, and demonstration projects, an energetic discussion on the blog of game designer Tony Walsh on the blog Clickable Culture clearly demonstrates that some users feel that these SL environmentalist players have not adequately addressed the impact of the tool they’re using.
One of Second Life’s great strengths is its ability to create immersively real, convincing replicas of real-world phenomena, without many of the material constraints of physical models. It allows such replicas to be generated by anyone who can muster the capital to purchase land, and so, while it is subject to market constraints, it permits a wider range of voices than a proprietor-built world like World of Warcraft can. It can also generate a “you are there†feeling of social presence that stimulates both embodied experience and realtime debate about the merits of policy choices. Thus far these strengths have not been adequately employed in self-critique. While griefers and other protesters have resisted the inroads of commodification, and the carbon offsets projects are promising, there is as yet no use of SL to model itself and its economic and environmental impacts. A project comparable to the culture-jamming work of Adbusters would seem to be an ideal fit, problematizing the very notions of virtuality and blurring boundaries between the physics within SL and its RL environment.
Second Line Stages, the only LEED film production facility in the United States, is holding a training seminar on sustainability in film production.
Called “Greening the Screenâ€, the event includes a training program for producers and filmmaking students October 27-28, followed by a public seminar from leading professionals on what it means to go green in Hollywood. Instructors and speakers will include producers from major film studios and experts in eco-friendly techniques, such asJane Evans, EVP, Physical Production, Focus Features (The American, Milk, Brokeback Mountain); Executive Producer Mari Jo Winkler (Dan in Real Life, Away We Go, Fair Game); Producer Kathleen Courtney (Daredevil, Because of Winn Dixie, Law Abiding Citizen, Bowfinger) and Joshua Throne, Production Manager (The Expendables, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt). Also coming are Meredith Bergmann and Katie Carpenter whose company Green Media Solutions has worked directly with NBC / Universal, among others, greening their productions over the past few years; their credits include HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, It’s Complicated and Saturday Night Live.
This slide-show on BBC news caught my eye as it demonstrates inter-species interactions through photographs and a sound track. I was expecting a film clip and actually enjoyed this more. I’m not sure why–perhaps because the stills allowed for more active imagination as I listened.
I’m writing to share and recommend a text that recently worked very nicely in an “Introduction to Literature†course for me here at UC Davis and that I look forward to transferring into Ecomedia courses in the future. “The 21 Steps†is a digital short story by Charles Cumming posted on the UK Penguin website as part of a six digital story series. The story itself is delivered in a series of quite small text boxes. One clicks a link in the box to proceed to the next bit of the story. These text boxes appear against a full-screen backdrop of GoogleEarth images showing the story’s setting and movement. Often the click to the next bit of text triggers first a movement of the GoogleEarth imagery before the next text appears. Very occasionally, in place of text, these clicks will pop up a text box with a photo instead, either of an object or of a computer screen featured in the story. What follows are two of the concepts and connections that emerged through class discussion.
Intertextuality. In the brief website blurb about the story, there is a link provided to The 39 Steps by John Buchan, the well-known novella that served as kernel for Alfred Hitchcock’s film by the same name. [And, I would argue this lineage is extended into William Gibson’s short story “Johnny Mnemonic†and its film adaptation.] We discussed basic issues of print fiction to film adaptation but were then able to extend this to thinking about whether this latest digital rendition was an adaptation or if different conceptualizations and language of the multiplicity of intertexts might be useful. Students were particularly engaged by the notion that novella to film seemed to them a transfer from a single medium to another one, while this latest transfer seems a hybrid of print, cinematic, and digital/computer media—a literary movie website. Complex discussions of textual ecosystems ensued with a particular focus on the concept of “distributed narratives†that I take from Pawel Frelik’s work (as with The Matrix: films, comics, computer games, websites…).
GIS and Focalization. Ursula Heise raises some excellent questions in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet about how technologies like GoogleEarth are modifying (or not) our sense of being, being earthlings. “The 21 Steps†is a great text for pursuing such questions with students in a classroom. My own approach to teaching “Intro to Lit†is to incorporate formal concepts of POV and Focalization into the production of compelling interpretations of texts and the contexts written into them, and this story offers an extension of formal analysis in light of digital media capabilities. The God’s-eye view presented graphically between the texts creates a dynamic tension with the First Person narration of the text-boxed print. GoogleEarth is something we usually control by ourselves via the keyboard, so there is a seeming interactivity, yet the destinations to which the imaging satellite move in this story are pre-chosen by the narrative events themselves. As such, not only does the visual background create dissonance with the First Person narrator, but it is, itself, uncanny—familiar yet working in an unfamiliar way. Students have described the resulting impression as experimental. When they are encouraged to focus on the variables of POV and Focalization, students find “The 21 Steps†an attempt at bringing the ancient act of narrating up to date with new technologies that are showing us views of ourselves and our world for which we do not yet have narrative capacities.
This is a vital space where we are trying to catch up our narrative capacities to technologically-mediated views (of ecology), where experiments bring together “old†and “new†media, and where critical approaches and tools are leveraged and modified to account for this coexistence of previous, present, and coming media modes. “The 21 Steps†can suggest to students that their conceptualization of the world and what they can do in it is not fully determined, at least not yet.
Studies of ecomedia have began addressing the ecological footprint of film production. Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann offer a brief discussion of An Inconvenient Truth’s carbon-neutral production (see their Ecology and Popular Film). Harri Kilpi argues that since “cinema also produces as a matter of fact concrete, real-world effects on the environment,” research focused on sustainability issues might “trace the ecological footprint of a given production and help contribute to the environmental audit of the industry” (see his “Green Frames: Exploring Cinema Ecocritically”). I recently attended a panel at a local film festival featuring producers, directors, and art designers speaking about the sustainability efforts underway. Here are some examples.
1. The Producers Guild of America Green Committee has developed a website for filmmakers who want to use sustainable strategies in greening their productions. The site includes tips, resources, articles, and case studies of sustainable productions. www.pgagreen.org
2. The Production Guild of America Foundation, with funding by some of the big players in the industry (Disney, Fox, NBC Universal, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Warner Brothers), created a Green Production Guide that list over 1 000 vendors that offer sustainable and energy saving products and services, as well as a Carbon Calculator specific for productions. www.greenproductionguide.com
3. Green Media Solutions is a consulting firm that provides entertainment productions with resources, staffing, and research to reduce their carbon emissions.
4. The Guide to Environmentally Sound Film & Video Production was written by filmmakers for filmmakers, outlining the application of sustainable production in every aspect of the production process through a case study of the making of the independent film No Telling (shot in 1990). www.glasseyepix.com/lowimpact/
5. The not-for-profit prop and set dressing boutique, Film Biz Recycling, was set up to accept donations of useful and reuseable items and to re-route these items to other organizations. www.filmbizrecycling.org
The ASLE Ecomedia pre-conference workshop’s details are officially up. Do consider signing up; we look forward to some excellent discussions.
Deadline for submissions is Nov 5, 2010. You can find more about the conference at the ASLE website.
This post summarizes a conference presentation I gave last weekend at FGCU’s Humanities and Sustainability Conference. My main objective is to explicate the theoretical differences between Arne Naess’s relatively popular “ecosophy T” and Felix Guattari’s ecosophical perspective, which he articulated in his later writings such as The Three Ecologies and Chaosmosis. The argument should be relevant to those working in ecomedia studies; indeed, I conclude by asserting that Guattari’s theory of ecosophy (less acknowledged than Naess’s) can open up hereto underdeveloped research in the eco-humanities fields, research which beckons the disciplinary expertise of scholars of non-print media and/or writing.
In spite of the major difference that I outline below, Naess and Guattari both address their respective ecosophies to the same paradigmatic problem and they both start from the same premise.
Paradigmatic Problem: the apparent fact that much of the world’s populations exhibit a tendency to experience themselves as entities separate and categorically distinct from the natural environment. (In other words, the widespread failure to live by Gregory Bateson’s point that the smallest unit of life is not an organism in itself but always organism plus environment.)
Premise: the ideal philosophical response in an age of ecological crises would intervene by (conceptually) redesigning the conventions by which we experience ourselves and the world (i.e., ontology) rather than proscribe a set of moral imperatives for people to follow (i.e., ethics). (Ideally, environmental ethics could programmed into this would-be ecological ontology.)
Naess’s Ecosophy T
If there is a unifying theory that connects most ecological approaches across the humanities disciplines, certainly that theory is Arne Naess’s widespread notion of deep ecology or “ecosophy T.â€Â At a fundamental level, the mission of Naess’s ecosophy is to expand the sphere of objects with which people identity. He believes that “identification elicits intense empathy†and that humans remain indifferent to that which they take to be utterly different than themselves. To support this position, Naess shares a personal anecdote about a flea that suddenly landed in a sample of acid chemicals, which Naess was studying under a microscope. He claims, “If I was alienated from the flea, not seeing intuitively anything even resembling myself, the [flea’s] death struggle would have left me indifferent” (Deep Ecology 15).
Naess goes on to claim that nature is all too often left out of the conventional, ego-driven formulation of what he calls our “narrow self;” Naess wants to inspire a movement beyond the ego-self toward an expanded ecological Self, which grows larger as one identifies with non-human species and particular elements or processes of natural environments. That is, Naess’s ecological Self includes all that one identifies with (which is not at all limited to one’s body or even one’s species). This ethical tricking of the ego-self into eco-Self becomes a way to instill a will-to-protect nature, such that to witness deforestation, for instance, is to experience the chopping away at one’s own being.
A living monument to Naess, literary ecocriticism, for example, typically invokes ecology as a strictly environmentalist discourse, and this position tends to prioritize the thematic study of literary representations of nature, often espousing, at the very least, a desire to distance one’s self from technological advancements and other complexities of modern urban life. (See Dana Phillip’s critique of popular stands of literary ecocritism in the early chapters of The Truth of Ecology.)
Guattari’s Ecosophical Perspective
Naess’s flea anecdote (above), a vital illustration of his thought, brings us to the most important difference between his ecosophy T and the ecosophy of Felix Guattari. Naess calls for an expansion of the self via identification (“Self-realizationâ€), whereas Guattari (and Deleuze) valorize autopoietic processes that perform a dissolution of the self via disjunction (“becoming-otherâ€). In other words—in a Guattarian reworking of the flea anecdote—I would not look for elements of the flea that remind me of myself; rather, I would receive the flea in its alterity and encounter aspects of the fleas that are completely different from myself, so as to “become-fleaâ€: to introduce the flea’s manner of existence into the way I think and live. (Deleuze and Guattari on becoming vs. identification: “Becoming is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree. Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something…”)
Initially, the difference between Naess’s identification and Guattari’s autopoiesis may seem trivial. This minor difference, however, actually lays out two divergent, even conflicting, paths for identity experience and subjectivity. Consequently, an eco-humanities inspired by Guattari’s theory of ecology would look very different than the familiar Naessian project of Nature appreciation. Naess is interested in ecology as a sort of deeper, more philosophical consideration of environmental problems; “the environment” that his ecosophy T addresses is generally synonymous with nature. Guattari, on the other hand, abstracts ecology from environmentalism, generalizing it into a robust theoretical framework capable of addressing question including but not limited to environmental ecologies, for most of his book The Three Ecologies elaborates on “social ecology†and “mental ecology.â€
While I hesitate to go into too much detail in this post, I will elaborate on one of the concepts that is crucial to Guattari’s ecosophy: nascent subjectivity. At the end of The Three Ecologies, Guattari claims that we must, in responding to the “major crises of our era,†invent new practices conducive to an identity experience he calls “nascent subjectivity†(45). What exactly is nascent subjectivity? Why does Guattari place such a high premium on it? And how would this nascent subjectivity put us in a better position to address contemporary ecological realities? By Deleuze and Guattari’s configuration, in contrast to the Cartesian cogito, an individual’s thoughts do not constitute the full measure of his being. The subject is less the product of his own thought and more the residue of the social machinery in which he directly and indirectly participates, for the boundaries of “private†thought are drawn through the sociohistorical apparatus (an emergent assemblage of desiring-machines). In many ways, Guattari’s thinking on nascent subjectivity can be seen as an extension of his earlier writings with Deleuze on the notion of the “residuum subject” (see chapter 1 of Anti-Oedipus). In The Three Ecologies, Guattari specifies some of the obscurities of Anti-Oedipus; in particular, the earlier image of the individual-as-residue is redrawn: the individual becomes a ‘terminal.’ Hence, one’s subjectivity is not only a by-product of forces operative in the three ecologies (mental, social, environmental); subjectivity is always already immersed in the flow of existential refrains or vectors. The individual can no longer be seen separately. To speak of an individual subject, natural as it seems, is to reinforce a reductive vocabulary of existence, which inhibits any actualization of “[a] collective and individual subjectivity that completely exceeds the limits of individualization, stagnation, identificatory closure, and will instead open itself up on all sides†(Three Ecologies 44). Nascent subjectivity, then, is not an entity one can postulate once and for all; indeed, it is best described as a process whereby thinking emerges immanently in relation with the event, which it perpetually strives to encounter—or receive—in the manner of a rhizome.
Relevance to Ecomedia Studies
Ecomedia studies partakes in Naess’s brand of ecosophy whenever the study of non-print, environmentally-themed media follows the critical agenda established by literary ecocriticism (e.g., canonizing nature-oriented works, enabling students to improve their relationships with nature and become more environmentally-conscious, critiquing particular representations of nature and environmental issues, etc.). While the aims of this agenda are certainly worthy, I do not think that ecomedia studies should be limited to Naessian project of nature appreciation. In addition to the questions common to literary ecocriticism, I want to think more about what is unique to film and new media: what can the study of these mediums contribute to the eco-humanities that no other field can? For me, the riches of digital media lie not only in the audiovisual representations of nature; the hypertextual nature of the internet, for example, attunes us to experience things at the level of relationships rather than isolatable entities. That is to say, ecomedia studies can also contribute to the realization of a more ecological identity experience, one closer to Guattari’s “nascent subjectivity” and further from the Cartesian cogito, which Naess (though he hopes to manipulate it) ultimately remains faithful to as though selfhood was an eternal fact of humanity. Scholars of grammatology, most notably Eric Havelock, argue convincingly that the identity experience we call selfhood was invented contemporaneously with literacy, as alphabetic writing made widely possible for the first time a separation of knowledge from the knower.) What new developments in identity experience do the writing systems of digital media make possible? This question becomes extremely relevant for ecomedia studies if one suspects, as I do, that the writing systems of digital media can be designed to, in various ways, facilitate more ecological dimensions of identity experience than those afforded by the ontological conventions of the literate self.
The Film Studies Program at Gettysburg College invites applications for a one-year position in Film & Media Studies beginning August 2011. This position carries a 3/3 load. Ph.D. preferred at time of appointment.
Gettysburg College emphasizes a liberal arts curriculum that makes connections across disciplines. Strong candidates should be able to connect cinema with other media, especially television, through various aesthetic, historical, economic, and theoretical models. In addition, candidates should also be willing to explore media from a global rather than an American perspective. Some interest in video production is a plus.
Gettysburg College is a highly selective liberal arts college located within 90 minutes of the Washington/Baltimore metropolitan area. Established in 1832, the College has a rich history and is situated on a 220-acre campus with an enrollment of over 2,600 students. Gettysburg College celebrates diversity and welcomes applications from members of any group that has been historically under-represented in the American academy. The College assures equal employment opportunity and prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, and disability.
Application deadline is February 14, 2011. Please send a letter of introduction, which should include teaching strengths, areas of research, and experience with the liberal arts, plus a complete CV (including references) to: Film & Media Studies Search, c/o Interdisciplinary Studies Program, Box 390, 300 N. Washington St., Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA 17325.