Technopolitics, Communication, and New Materialisms

Abstract

The political economy of information, communication, and culture (EPICC) has sought to elucidate and problematize the ways in which the media system is implicated in capitalist accumulation and value generation. Initially, its focus was on analyzing traditional media systems, structures, and regulations. Since the 1980s, this agenda has broadened to encompass the concentration and financialization of the sector, while the 1990s saw the debate over information and communication convergence become firmly established. In the twenty-first century, media digitalization has advanced alongside discussions of platformization, surveillance capitalism, and, more recently, artificial intelligence. Most analyses of the value chain in which the information and communications sector operates, however, remain confined to the production, circulation, and consumption of media content, paying little attention either to the preliminary stage of production involving the extraction of raw materials required for manufacturing digital equipment or to the subsequent stage associated with the waste and pollution generated by these processes. As digitalization has expanded and become widespread on a global scale, it has become necessary to pose new questions within the field of EPICC and to broaden the theoretical frameworks available in communication policy and technopolitics. This requires the development of new explanatory and analytical perspectives on the materiality of the digital and the related challenges that define this emerging communication ecology. From this viewpoint, the new materialisms constitute a body of scholarship that enables us to reconsider the value chain of digital communication within a broader diagnosis that foregrounds the struggle over the natural resources required to manufacture digital devices, processes of extractivism and neocolonialism, the deep timescales over which the impacts of electronic waste must be assessed, and the carbon footprint they leave on the system of expanded reproduction.