Freshly Printed - allow 7 days lead
Couldn't load pickup availability
Enduring Digital Damage
Rhetorical Reckonings for Planetary Survival
Dustin Edwards (Author)
9780817322472
Hardback, published 15 November 2025
202 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.567 kg
"Using anti-racist, feminist, decolonial approaches, Edwards moves beyond documenting environmental damage in the Anthropocene, instead proposing actionable connections to land that recognize our complicity in the complex relationships between digital infrastructures and physical environments. Edwards employs a gentle, compelling writing style that advances environmental media studies through a rhetorical perspective, offering unique insights through careful attention to embodied politics." —Mél Hogan, host of The Data Fix podcast and an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen's University. "Deploying a digital-material rhetoric with acute focus on storying digital damage, Edwards aims to show us in this extraordinary—and extraordinarily timely—book how we might think about the digital in both rhetorically and materially ethical ways, aware not only of the damage that our tools do but of the ways in which they also call us into responsibility for each other and the planet." —Jonathan Alexander, Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine "Enduring Digital Damage is well-researched, well-synthesized, and truly graceful in reckoning with unsettling theoretical 'truths' accepted in areas of digital, rhetorical, and posthuman theory." —Jennifer Clary-Lemon, author of Nestwork: New Material Rhetorics for Precarious Species
Networks the intricate relationship between rapidly advancing digital technologies and environmental degradation and reveals the costs of our globally connected world. Taking a step back from the screens of electronic devices and exploring the profound impacts of digital technologies on our environment, Enduring Digital Damage lifts the veil on the "hidden costs" in our modern technological world. Dustin Edwards traces key moments in the lifecycle of technology—such as the extraction of raw materials to the disposal of electronic waste—to uncover the often overlooked consequence of our digital age. He illuminates how data centers, mining operations, and other digital infrastructures contribute to environmental harm and how the rapidly increasing demand for land use and water access is essential to sustain our growing digital needs. Weaving together narratives of technological advancement and ecological destruction, Edwards presents a comprehensive analysis of the true cost of our digital lives. By drawing on case studies, cultural critique, and a critical examination of labor and sustainability, Enduring Digital Damage reveals the deeper histories and ongoing struggles that make our digital lives possible, urging readers to imagine the possibility of a less harmful and extractive world.
Acknowledgments Prologue: The Open Pit and Stories from Somewhere Part I. Inheriting Worlds Chapter 1. Dwelling with Digital Damage Chapter 2. The Deep Conditions of Digital-Material Rhetoric Part II. Storying Worlds Chapter 3. Data Chapter 4. Mining Part III. Inventing Worlds Chapter 5. Invention at the End of This World Chapter 6. After Damage Postscript: To Keep a Story Going Notes References Index