We make the digital from the natural world, crafting metals and plastics into sleek handheld forms. We observe and make our understandings of environments through digital devices, spreadsheet accounting and carbon calculations. We have brought epochal shifts into being through rhetoric, disciplines, and geological measures. The Anthropocene is a digitally mediated and produced time. Yet the ‘we’ of these statements is an unevenly distributed set of actors, and the politics of producing (knowledge of) the Digital Anthropocene are pressing. From planetary observation and oceanic measurement to marine tailings, the appropriation of precious metals and labors of pollution, anthropogenic knowledge is deeply woven in with computation, tools, media and devices. It is also constituted through histories of colonialism, political economy, and ways of being in and knowing the world. Teaching the Digital Anthropocene is necessarily an interdisciplinary endeavor. This syllabus is offered as a resource for bringing together materials for teaching.
Rachel Douglas-Jones, 15 June 2021, "The Digital Anthropocene Syllabus - 2020 - Douglas-Jones", contributed by Emily York, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 15 June 2021, accessed 20 April 2024. http://www.stsinfrastructures.org/content/digital-anthropocene-syllabus-2020-douglas-jones
Critical Commentary
We make the digital from the natural world, crafting metals and plastics into sleek handheld forms. We observe and make our understandings of environments through digital devices, spreadsheet accounting and carbon calculations. We have brought epochal shifts into being through rhetoric, disciplines, and geological measures. The Anthropocene is a digitally mediated and produced time. Yet the ‘we’ of these statements is an unevenly distributed set of actors, and the politics of producing (knowledge of) the Digital Anthropocene are pressing. From planetary observation and oceanic measurement to marine tailings, the appropriation of precious metals and labors of pollution, anthropogenic knowledge is deeply woven in with computation, tools, media and devices. It is also constituted through histories of colonialism, political economy, and ways of being in and knowing the world. Teaching the Digital Anthropocene is necessarily an interdisciplinary endeavor. This syllabus is offered as a resource for bringing together materials for teaching.