This article explores how media literacy and environmental education can be integrated through the concept of "ecomedia literacy." The author explains how metaphors commonly used to describe digital media, such as "cloud storage" and "streaming," misleadingly suggest environmental neutrality while masking significant ecological impacts. Digital technologies create vast amounts of plastic pollution, depend heavily on freshwater for manufacturing, cooling data centers, and other processes, yet these impacts remain largely invisible to users.
Drawing on the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching technique of asking students to "see clouds in paper" as an exercise in systems thinking, the author develops a framework called the "ecomediasphere" to help students analyze their personal electronic devices. This framework divides analysis into four zones: ecoculture (marketing, discourses, cultural beliefs), political ecology (production chains, labor conditions), ecomateriality (physical components, resource extraction), and lifeworld (sensory experiences, psychological impacts).
The author describes implementing this framework in an undergraduate Media and Environment course, where students researched their personal devices (mostly Apple products) and discovered connections to plastic pollution, conflict minerals, exploited labor, and environmental destruction. While students developed systems thinking about their devices, few made explicit connections to water impacts without specific prompting. Student reflections revealed predominantly negative feelings about their relationship with technology, including addiction, anxiety, and alienation.
The article concludes that while one semester cannot comprehensively address educational gaps around technology's environmental impacts, ecomedia literacy can help students recognize the material reality behind their devices and prompt more environmentally conscious choices.
The Bottom Line
This 2023 article introduces ecomedia literacy as a methodology for teaching critical awareness of the environmental impacts of digital technologies made of plastic, using the guiding metaphor of water. The author develops a framework called the "ecomediasphere" that helps students perform holistic analyses of their personal electronic devices through four interconnected zones of inquiry: ecoculture (the symbols and stories associated with gadgets), political ecology (the ideological aspects and social structures of production), ecomateriality (the physical composition and environmental footprint), and lifeworld (how devices impact sensory, cognitive, and emotional experiences). Drawing on Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching method of seeing "clouds in paper," the approach helps students visualize the hidden environmental impacts of their devices, particularly on water systems. The article reflects on student research projects conducted using this framework, which revealed their growing awareness of the global production chain impacts of personal gadgets, though explicit connections to water impacts remained underdeveloped.