ABSTRACT
The increased adaptation of the ecosystem metaphor by media practitioners is a welcome shift in thinking about media as complex systems. However, more often than not such metaphorical usage excludes important ways of viewing the relationship between media and living systems. 1 For example, it may be trendy to talk about the iPhone or Facebook as distinct ecosystems, yet it is likely done so without regard to the material ecosystems that support those platforms. In common usage, ecosystem becomes just another phrase for distinguishing corporate technological environments. But such thinking obscures the material reality of media, further reinforcing economic norms that make it permissible to externalize the cost of our media’s environmental destruction. In response, we should repurpose the biological roots of “ecosystem” to embed the term within a true environmental context. This means redefining media ecosystems as not just informa tion or technological environments, but as phenomenological and materially embedded ones as well.
