Thinking about the Earth as an object requires some imagination. As far asobjects go, it is a really big one: The Earth’s diameter is about 8,000 miles(with a bit of variation when measured at the poles). It’s also very old—it hasan age of about 4.5 billion years. It’s pretty dense too, and is composed ofvarious chemical compounds, mostly silica, but also significantly alumina,lime, magnesia, water, carbon dioxide, iron oxide and so on.

But there is something that textbook facts and measurements like these don’t

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The Geology of MediaFuture archaeologists will have a lot of material to dig through. An Object

Lesson.

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really capture. It feels insufficient to think of the geological Earth as an object,when it is made of up so many connected and interdependent things, such asthe atmosphere. It is an object of interfaces: the magma, the terra, theatmosphere, and so on—so many envelopes in which we live as part of deepspace.

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By the 18th century, increasingly accurate measurement techniques forcedhumans to consider the Earth as a scientific object. This shift requiredacknowledging the layered structure of the earth, and recognizing that thisstructure corresponds with temporality. Depth digs through time, and deepexcavations down into the earth involved a kind of time travel.

Scottish geologist James Hutton conceived of this immense scale of time ofthe Earth, in which the seeming solidity of the land was actually part of alonger timescale of processes of destruction and decay that were essential forlife: plants feed on soil, which itself “is nothing but the materials collectedfrom the destruction of the solid land.” The Earth was reconceived as adynamic entity, one that reached back millions of years. The solid land is onetemporary consolidation of organic and non-organic processes. Just give ittime.

Today, we acknowledge that the Earth consists of geological layers in bothdirections. Moving down from our feet we find the lithosphere, the crust, theupper mantle, the mantle, the asthenosphere, the outer core and the innercore. Moving up from our heads: the troposphere, the stratosphere, themesosphere, the thermosphere.

We usually see media as an immaterial sphere of communication, onedetached from the human world: Ever since the telegram, messages haveflowed faster than their tangible manifestations could have been conveyed.We sometimes understand information as a sphere of its own. This habitcontinues today, with digital culture pitched as an immaterial sphere ofinformation where ideas become coded into zeroes and ones, independent ofmaterial substrate, transportable on the vague and indeterminate channel of“the Internet.”

But digital culture is completely dependant on Earth’s long duration. Despitethe fallacy that media is increasingly immaterial, wireless, and smoothlyclouded by data services, we are more dependent than ever on the geologicalearth. Geology does not appear in normal conversations about media andculture, but there would be no media without geology. This isn’t a simplisticjoke, that without the Earth under our feet there would be no need foruniversities talking about the Earth or offices of social-media startups inSilicon Valley plotting away metaphorical business strategies like the“mining” and “dumping” of data. Rather, the resources and materialsgathered from geological depths enable our media technologies to function.

Sometimes we do acknowledge the work of the smart people behind suchinnovations: scientists and engineers who enable high tech industrialprocesses from electricity to network engineering, from processortechnologies to the meticulous development of screens that convey highdefinition audiovisuality.

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But the materiality of media is something “harder” than the usual hardwarelayers we mistake to be the endpoint of media materiality. Our electronics arelike mini-mines of minerals and metals themselves: copper, gold, lead,mercury, palladium and silver among other metals. Too often, the extractionof Earth has simultaneously poisoned it, for example the coltan (columbite–tantalite) mines in Congo, which have fueled bloody wars there.

For this reason, the long-lasting legacy of Silicon Valley will not amount tocorporations or branding or creativity or individualism, but its soil: the heavyconcentration of toxins that will last much longer than the businesses and

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remind of the geological afterglow of the digital hype, the residue of the techcompanies use of chemicals in the manufacturing of our devices. Benzene,trichloroethylene and Freon are not necessarily “things” we associate withdigital media cultural ephemerality, but they are some of the historicalexamples of health hazards caused from production of disk drives.

Indeed, the dynamics of the Earth are increasingly the focus of ourtechnological culture: from technologies of measurement concerning climatesand geological resources, to maximizing the communication capacities ofsatellite orbits and gauging wireless traffic through the air—the Earth is nowan object dealt with on its own scale, a thing to be put to use as a whole,though we’ll still use it piecemeal as well.

There are various natural and fictional histories that imagine the Earth as abizarre, living organism. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “When the World Screamed”(1928) features the prototype of the mad scientist, Professor Challenge, whopierces through the various layers of the Earth, making it scream. Later, JamesLovelock’s Gaia hypothesis argues for a massive dynamic interdependencyamong the planet’s ecosystems, suggesting that we see the Earth as alive inanother, less familiar way.

By realizing the geological importance of the Earth for media culture, wemight also acknowledge that the Earth is a communicative object itself. Notonly that we keenly visualize, talk and imagine the Earth as an object throughmedia representations—but that there would not be any media without theresource base offered by its geology. Even that the Earth as living creaturecommunicates via the assembled resources it fashions and provides.

Whether as an organism or a communicator, the Earth now also subsumes thenew materials we have fashioned from it. The philosopher Gary Genosko hassuggested reframing the pre-Socratic theory that the world consists of the four

A cell phone dump site (David Ohmer/Flickr)

elements of air, water, fire and earth in relation to their industrialapplications. Today, industry takes advantage of high-technological processesto extract and use earth elements, leaving behind an excess of after-productsin the process: nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and sulfurdioxide. Centuries or millennia hence, these residues will remain long afterour iPhones have been forgotten. This commercial geological domain is nolonger restricted to the Earth, either: space asteroids have become a popularfuture target for mining valuable minerals, materials necessary for thereproduction of technological culture, including the technology of miningitself.

Practitioners and theorists of digital culture often look for the edge cases, theexceptions, seeking an avant-garde of media arts to underscore the unseentechnological possibilities of our gadgets. Glitch art and the “New Aesthetic”have emerged as new domains of practice in which computers do unexpectedthings without us. And media archaeologists like Siegfried Zielinski havemustered the paleontological term “deep time” in reference to media culture,looking for longer histories of today’s media arts than we usually write.

But we need to take this further. Imagine what the fossil record will look likein millions of years. A future media archaeologist digs through the ruins ofelectronic media culture, finding few traces of media devices, keypads ortouch screens, headsets or power cables. Rather, she discovers a range ofenvironmentally hazardous materials that forms part of the growing wastepiles that are the true leftovers of “dead media”—the residue of our expiredindustrial equipment and personal devices. Silicon, found in abundance innormal sand, was an important discovery for computer culture. Perhaps afuture abundance in the decayed materials of a geological strata will be madeof computers and other digital objects we will have left behind.

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JUSSI PARIKKA is a writer, media theorist, and reader in media and design at theUniversity of Southampton. He is the author of Insect Media.