Vibrant media matter : video games, social media, and ecological justice

This thesis builds a framework for media studies that is better able to address the role of media in issues of environmental and ecological justice. Rooted in Jane Bennett’s “vibrant materialism,” this framework critiques subject-object orientations in order to break down ontological heirarchies of matter that center humans to instead regard all matter (including meda matter) as coequal, coactant, and vibrant. Media has the potential to reflect and reproduce our most ecologically destructive ideologies, but also to mediate and reshape a relationship with our environment and ecology that is more sustainable and just for both human and nonhuman entities. All our media things—video game worlds, computer hardware, social media platforms—have ecologically capacities. For media and media studies to address issues of ecological justice, media scholars, makers, and consumers must reckon with the capacities of nonhuman things and our ecological relationship with them. Using Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as its primary case study, this project pulls together literature from a variety of disciplines, including posthumanism, video game studies, fan studies, and environmental studies. It applies its vibrant materialist framework to Breath of the Wild as a video game text, as well as to online engagement in connection with the game, IRL engagment with real-world environments, and the ecological threats those environments face. Highlighting the affective force (the “thing-power,” as Bennett would say) of nonhuman things and places—from Hyrulian forests, to r/Zelda Reddit threads, to the real-world neighborhoods of players and watersheds of the Great Salt Lake—this project consdiers how the affects of humans and nonhumans reverberate across the boundaries of the virtual and the physical, of nature and culture, affectively tieing us and our media things into a vibrant material ecology—for better or worse. This project posits that we are “vibrant cyborgs”—human selves rife with the affects of nonhumanity, affectively interwoven with both our technologies, our fictions, and the “natural” world. Lastly, this project suggests some further directions for future ecomedia research to explore.Radio-Television-Fil