UC Davis

This dissertation intervenes in the study of media ecosystems with the provocation that physical computing networks are, in fact, synthetic ecologies. This is not just an analogy, as these ecologies are built from the everyday rhythms and events of user engagement across time and space. My central question is, how do contemporary digital infrastructures tie production to consumption, pecuniary value to sociality, and captivation to open systems? My research utilizes a semio-material analyses from science and technology studies as the bedrock of my methodological approach to these digital systems. This dissertation juxtaposes a discursive analysis of the visual, linguistic and procedural rhetoric of digital ecosystems with more phenomenological, performative and material investigations. By zooming in to particular social networks, videogame productions, and physical computing infrastructures, my research shows how daily events, rhythms and moments of production are responsible for the building of these synthetic ecologies. This is important, because it shows that intervening and improvising within digital ecosystems requires a shift to temporal and spatial scales that are thoroughly nonhuman. My research concludes that the daily monitoring and control endemic to synthetic ecologies problematizes an understanding of technology that is ‘prosthetic’ – or added to – human embodiment. Surveillance then becomes insufficient as an explanation for how these various systems function, because there are no “eyes” or “I” in the ecosystem. As we enter a new era of digital everydayness, where partially-visible infrastructures meter and monitor our here and now, my research evidences that an ecological approach to our study of digital media is essential for understanding the practices that synthesize ‘unsustainable’, ‘closed’, and ‘dumb’ social and ecological futures through rhetorics of ‘sustainability,’ ‘play,’ ‘openness,’ and ‘intelligence’.