Geopolitics of Information: The Media Commons (ePub)

Today's global media sustains a potent new environmental consciousness. Paradoxically, it also serves as a far-reaching platform that promotes the unsustainable consumption ravaging our planet. Patrick Murphy musters theory, fieldwork, and empirical research to map how the media communicates today's many distinct, competing, and even antagonistic environmental discourses. The media draws the cultural boundaries of our environmental imagination—and influences just who benefits. Murphy's analysis emphasizes social context, institutional alignments, and commercial media's ways of rendering discussion. He identifies and examines key terms, phrases, and metaphors as well as the ways consumers are presented with ideas like agency and the place of nature. What emerges is the link between pervasive messaging and an "environment" conjured by our media-saturated social imagination. As the author shows, today's complex, integrated media networks shape, frame, and deliver many of our underlying ideas about the environment. Increasingly—and ominously—individuals and communities experience these ideas not only in the developed world but in the increasingly consumption-oriented Global South.|
Cover
Title
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Earth Discourses: Theorizing the Environment for Global Media Studies
2. Endless Growth: Neoliberalism and Global Media's Promethean Logic
3. Neo-Malthusian Entertainment: The Limits of Green TV
4. Battle of the Blogosphere: Monsanto versus the World
5. Amazonian Indigenous Green: Media and the Ecologically Noble Savage
Conclusion: Earth Discourses and the Question of Agency in the Media Commons
Notes
Bibliography
Index|Patrick Murphy is an associate professor in the department of media studies and production at Temple University. Murphy is a co-editor of Negotiating Democracy: Media Transformation in Emerging Democracies and Global Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives.