ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the contemporary eco-crisis challenges the foundations of media studies, which must find ways to become a greener discipline. The media studies focus on how the media frames global awareness of the transnational risks associated with climate change and other threats to the Earth's well-being. Massive levels of conventional pollution are still a problem for the over-developed world and, as in the case of China, in the fast-growing economies of Asia too. Greening media studies begins by acknowledging an historic responsibility to face the challenge of the ecological crisis as a fundamental challenge to critical scholarship in the field. Media studies have a marginal sub discipline analyzing media technology from a political-economic perspective, but relatively few scholars have employed an ecologically critical framework. The humanistic idolization depicts new media technology as an enabler of human understanding, a tool for extending our capacities for expression and exchange.
