Environmental Management of the Media

Policy, Industry, Practice

Pietari Kääpä

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317232766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

In recent years the widely held misconception of the media as an 'ephemeral' industry has been challenged by research on the industry's significant material footprint. Despite this material turn, no systematic study of this sector has been conducted in ways that considers the role of the media industries as consumers and users of a range of natural resources.

Filling this gap, Environmental Management of the Media discusses the environmental management of the media industries in the UK and the Nordic countries. These Nordic countries, both as a set of small nations and as a regional constellation, are frequently perceived as some of the 'greenest' in the world, yet, not only is the footprint of the media industries practically ignored in academic research, but the very real stakes of the industries' global impact are not comprehensively understood. Here, the author focuses on four key areas for investigating the material impact of Nordic media: (1) resources used for production and dissemination; (2) regulation of the media; (3) organizational management; and (4) labour practices. By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective that combines ecocritical analysis with interrogation of the political economy of the creative industries, Kääpä argues that taking the industries to task on their environmental footprint is a multilevel resource and organizational management issue that must be addressed more effectively in contemporary media studies.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of media, communication and environmental studies.

1 Material Implications of the Media

Introduction

At the culmination of the latest round of negotiations in Paris in 2015 on global responses to climate change, the United Nations (UN) celebrated the acceptance of a global climate agreement with an unabashed sense of achievement. The participants were quick to draw attention to new developments such as enticing the previously reticent USA and China to fully ratify its calls. However, critics did not hesitate to point out that the agreement was conditional on a considerable degree of ambiguity and uncertainty, drawing attention to the extent of the commitments and the ability of the UN to enforce them. These critiques were shared internally within the UN as key participants such as Christina Figuoreira, the Chief Negotiator, expressed scepticism over the applicability of the agreement and the tangible plans proposed by many key participants to control their emissions. Simultaneously, while steps were taken to curtail heavy carbon industries and other significant emitters of greenhouse gases, these address only a fraction of global environmental hazards and provide no comprehensive methodologies for dealing with the wide scale of polluting elements and the factors that contribute to them. Policy decisions were understandably geared at curbing massive amounts of process and waste emissions on a global scale by targeting those industrial sectors with the largest footprint. Yet, many other key sectors were practically ignored in these discussions.

One such omission is the role of information and communication technologies (ICT). Greenpeace estimates that the sector consumed over 7 per cent of global electricity demand in 2012, projecting that this could exceed 12 per cent by 2017, and continue to grow at least 7 per cent annually through 2030, double the average rate of electricity growth globally (Greenpeace 2017). The global communications infrastructure powers the economy and increasingly shapes politics in most parts of the world. Furthermore, they facilitate the formation and consolidation of the interconnected ‘scapes’ of globalization that Appadurai (1996) discusses. It would not be an overstatement to suggest that ICT penetrates and consolidates modern social life. As media platforms and technologies reach ubiquity, they require a range of resources in ever-expanding amounts. Important legislation like RoHS (Restrictions on Hazardous Substances) and WEEE (Waste Energy and Electricity Emissions) regulate materials that go into the production and recycling of media devices. However, these regulations are often superseded by legislative loopholes and criminal undercurrents in the e-graveyards of the world.

Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller (2012) argue that ICT companies are very much complicit in the proliferation of electronic waste through circumventing legislation trying to curtail its harmful effects. Shortened lifespans as part of planned obsolescence strategies and the fashioning of media gear are just some of the complex considerations that influence the impact that the communications ecosystem has on the environment. In addition, some estimate that the internet consumes up to 8 per cent of the total electricity generation in the UK (Hodgson 2015). This is not even considering problems like print and the chemicals of the publishing industry and the substantial resource-intense usage in film and television production, all areas that require specific attention to their protocols and practice. Considering the environmental footprint of the ICT infrastructure, it is clear that more needs to be done outside of RoHS and WEEE. Why was this particular sector and industry not a target for the UN session? Why has there been so little intergovernmental discussion about the huge scale of the ICT industry?

Ecomedia

While the relationship between the media and the environment has met with substantial interest from academics, most studies to date have focused on representational concerns. They discuss the ways environmental considerations are conveyed and communicated on television (Good 2013), social networks (Anderson 2014; Parham 2015), journalism (Cox and Pezzullo 2014) or film (Ingram 2000; Brereton 2005; Willoquet-Maricondi 2010; Rust et al. 2014a; Kääpä 2014). Others have focused on the facilitation of public awareness and policy through representational means. Discussion often works on specific thematic concerns, such as climate change (Hibberd and Nguyen 2013) or green rhetoric in the press (Hansen 2011). Much of this work accepts the general view that the media industries contribute to societal awareness of environmental issues – they have a ‘brainprint’ that can shape individual behaviour and policy. These studies consolidate an ecocritical approach focusing on, for example, addressing how mainstream media normalizes perceptions of the human-nature dichotomy or how corporate communications use greenwashing rhetoric for public relations purposes.

While these works have advanced the field of environmental communications significantly on understanding the influence of the media on awareness of environmental considerations, they do not account for the wider socio-environmental or physical-material impact of the industries. In short, they rarely consider the resources that go into the infrastructure or the actual production mechanisms facilitating the conveyance of these messages. Sean Cubitt’s study Ecomedia (2005) was one of the first comprehensive studies to focus on these material concerns, outlining not only many of the materials that go into media production, exhibition, distribution and consumption but also initiating scholarly discussion on the environmental footprint of digital media. To these ends, Cubitt’s work constructs a range of suggestions in drawing attention to the detrimental environmental effects of the media industry. Among these, the massive consumption of electricity by data server farms as well as the use of energy-intensive terminal devices form particular concerns when approaching digital communications from an environmental perspective. In addition to infrastructural concerns, the emergence of the social habits of a convergent media culture have an environmental significance not often addressed by policy or academic work. Pervasive or ubiquitous media indicates not only that we have to be constantly connected, or ‘on’ (Turkel 2008), but also necessitates that consumers worldwide keep consuming, proliferating media messages interconnected on multiple platforms, all requiring ever increasing amounts of resources to feed the habit.

Cubitt’s work emphasizes the notion that those studying the media cannot only focus on texts but need to take into account the variety of contextual factors that underpin media production. Adrian Ivakhiv takes up this point by suggesting the focus of critical analysis would need to be on ‘things, processes, and systems that support and enable the making and disseminating of cultural texts’ (Ivakhiv 2007: 19). This approach underlines Cubitt’s argument concerning the necessity to consider media in all its complex contextuality, meaning that the analyst must focus on both the resources and labour for media production in addition to the messages it carries. Ivakhiv considers this approach as a means to expand analytical frames outside the representational and the ideological:

A holistic eco-cinecriticism closely analyzes not only the representations found in a film but the telling of the film itself – its discursive and narrative structures, its inter-textual relations with the larger world, its capacities for extending or transforming perception of the larger world – and the actual contexts and effects of the film and its technical and cultural apparatus in the larger world.

(ibid.: 18)

These key works have paved the way for a material turn in our understanding of the nature of media. These include seminal works such as Lisa Parks’ (2007) study of the material conditions of television networks, including cable and satellite television, and Jennifer Gabrys’s Digital Rubbish (2011), focusing on the proliferation of digital media devices. At stake in these works is the realization that there is much more to an environmental understanding of the media than the focus on content and messages or even the waste and emissions generated by production activities. The shift in analytical scope urged by these works is on the considerable infrastructure facilitating communications, that is, on the parts that do not fit with a conventional instrumental understanding of the media as a means to facilitate human communications. Thus, Parks discusses both electronic waste and the electronic waves that enable communications while Gabrys explores the materials that go into the production of the devices used to consume and produce media, as well as their considerable afterlife. Similar calls are made by Jane Bennett’s (2010) work on vibrant materialities and Jussi Parikka’s on the geology of media (2015), which both draw from new materialism and media archaeology to shift focus to the matter that produces the media. In these perspectives, media is the means of communications premised on a range of material processes. These include geological, chemical, biological and electric processes that leave a material footprint that can be assessed. Positioning media as a process of substances and electronic impulses means that there is both more and less to media than anthropogenic cultural messages. The media are thus more than human and less than human and both sides must form a part of any analysis of its environmental impact.

Two recent collections have arguably consolidated this material turn in media studies. The first of these, Nicole Starosielski and Lisa Parks’ Signal Traffic (2015), hosts articles on the digital infrastructure. The focus here is predominantly on the ICT infrastructure that shapes the conduits of modern society, including the material groundings, such as cable networks and energy infrastructures, essential for the communications industry. Janet Walker and Starosielski’s Sustainable Media (2016) casts its scope even wider and covers most traditional and emerging areas of the media. Chapters focus on the different energies and practices that form the media we consume. Especially notable are Brennan’s work on back-up cultures, which takes to task the use of ‘immaterial’ Cloud services and the proliferating file management habits it generates, and Vaughan’s study of the resources used for the production of Singing in the Rain (1952). The latter provides the seeds for an approach he calls ‘ecomaterialism’ which shifts the critical attention to the environmental consequences of film production methods. These collections provide a wide-ranging consolidation of the argument for the necessity to understand media studies as a field firmly planted in the various materialities that comprise its very existence.

Meanwhile, other work has been instrumental in pushing the field in unexpected directions. Nadia Bozak’s work (2012) is notable for providing an ecophilosophical exploration of the environmental roles of the cinematic image. She argues that the tangibility of films reroutes the spectator to consider the resources that went into the production of the text they witness and thus facilitates a heightened sense of awareness of their material conditions. Similar work is undertaken in Kaapa’s (2011) collection on ecocinema audiences. Chapters consider the ways audiences take on board environmental messages and make use of them in their cognitive and ideological responses to climate change. Ecophilosophical work focusing on spectators and reception contexts is also present in collections such as Chinese Ecocinema (Lu and Mi 2009) and Transnational Ecocinema (Gustafsson and Kaapa 2013). While the chapters contained in these studies focus mostly on philosophical aspects emerging from the texts studied, they also include work on the production apparatus of an ecological adventure like James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) or on the uses of discarded DVDs as agricultural supplements.

Another strand of ecocritical work synergizes the political economy of the industry with environmental concerns. Maxwell and Miller’s Greening the Media (2012) combines the infrastructural – both regulatory and especially the technological – scope of some of the earlier work with a focus on environmental accounting in media organizations. Through this, they explore the regulatory and financial motivations for introducing environmental considerations into the media industry. Maxwell and Miller’s analysis suggests that the accountants of a media organization are best positioned to negotiate or minimize the footprint of the sector. They are key players in ensuring the industry is aware of the emissions it generates and developing practices to take stock of these responsibilities. Similar arguments have been made by Christian Fuchs (2008, 2014) in relation to exploitative labour conditions – both human and environmental – in the production of the digital media infrastructure. He argues that we need to consider environmental problems ‘social problems, not technological’ ones (Fuchs 2008: 308), as ultimately, environmental protocols are instituted through social and political negotiations. This is a significant intervention that will shape much of the approach of this book, especially in terms of understanding environmental concerns as management and regulatory practices.

The material turn

Despite all these recent works on material media, Walker and Starosielski argue that it ‘is surprising how little ecocriticism has … concentrated on the ecological impact of media-related things, processes, networks, systems, and infrastructures’ (2016: 13). At stake here is a shift in the study of media from ideological representations to the processes that comprise the contextual existence of the industry. This requires both a rethink of the ontological potential of media as well as the epistemological foundations of media studies. The challenge to ontology comes from a shift in focus to media production and materiality as well as its impact on society. Rather than just understanding it as a communicator of environmental messages, it is taken as a material practice that has a footprint that can be traced and evaluated. The epistemological challenge comes from the need to rethink how the media has been studied. As we have suggested, the field to date has predominantly focused on brainprinting, but with this material turn it is increasingly clear that footprinting holds at least equal value as a topic of analysis.

This focus on the material qualities of the media provides an important intervention in exploring the physical repercussions of the industry. The mediacity of media has of course been a topic of debate at least since McLuhan’s (1964) arguments on the media as a powerful force capable of changing social structures through technological evolutions. Thus, one could state that instead of the media being the message, it is now the material that is the message. Yet, we must be careful with the ways we incorporate materiality into our analytical approach so as not to allow our understanding of the media’s environmental role be overtaken by technological or materialist determinism – that is, of a focus on materiality that undoes the many political and social influences that also play significant roles in these processes. Messages communicated by the media – both ‘content’ and internal communications about the industry’s perceptions of its own environmental role – counteract and reinforce the contextual – the material – operations of their production and consumption. As we will see, discourse and textuality continue to be as relevant as ever and provide the means to understand how materialities influence the media and how media production and management shape the material base in return.

Using sustainability as an approach, Cubitt provides a productive explanation for the ways the balance between the material base of production and the anthropocentric management of the industry needs to be understood. This involves the need ‘to make the media more committed to sustainability, to sustain the very media we use, and to make a world where media are sustenance’ (Cubitt 2017: 14). According to this argument, all levels of the media ecosystem must be sustainable: the infrastructure for communications must adhere to ecological principles, the media must be able to generate enough economic and reputational capital to sustain itself, and finally, it needs to communicate messages of value to its audiences that, in turn, feed into the necessity for the sector to act on what it preaches.

Media management

As can be seen from this very brief outline of academic work on the subject, evaluating the environmental role of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Material implications of the media
• 2. The network
• 3. Media policy in actor networks
• 4. Material rhetoric
• 5. The sustainability rhetoric of film and television organizations
• 6. Regulatory infrastructure
• 7. The media in the Nordic countries: broadcasting
• 8. The publishing industry in the Nordic countries
• 9. Film and television
• 10. Conclusion: balancing between the footprint and the brainprint
• Index