Spectacle Earth - Cultural Frames, Framing Culture by Andrew Kalaidjian

About the Book

Book Synopsis

What does it mean to watch a disaster unfold? Does exposure to a source of dread spur people to action or lull them into fatalism and complacency? Andrew Kalaidjian takes up these and other vital questions in Spectacle Earth, a lively and wide-ranging consideration of media engagement, passivity, and virtual environments in relation to ecological crises and climate change.

Kalaidjian begins by tracing the long trajectory of environmental aesthetics and natural sciences that have led up to the Anthropocene. He then looks at the lessons learned from artist and activist movements of the 1960s and 1970s before laying out the new challenges in the digital age of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and virtual reality. The result is groundbreaking, offering readers a new media literacy that goes beyond individual therapeutic experience to provide forms of expression that can lead to the sorts of solidarity and connection needed to change the planet for the better.

Review Quotes

There is much to admire in this study of the media's role in the climate crisis. It draws on a formidable range of sources from across the media and tech bandwidth as well as literature, science, socioeconomics, art, and philosophy, and it is noticeably well written. With a talent for epigrams and a journalist's pacing, Kalaidjian (English, California State Univ.) coins terms with ease (the "Mediacene" subs in for the Anthropocene) and proceeds with caution through the hype of technological "abundance."

In this sweeping work of media theory and criticism, Kalaidjian zigs and zags across the gamut of human cultural production, crafting a multimedia rumination on novels, video games, art installations, and more. Throughout, his sights are trained on those pieces of media possessing the formal and theoretical mettle to stand up to a world riven by ecological crisis and hypermediated apathy. . . Spectacle Earth offers readers a smorgasbord of critical reflections upon our Mediascene, entreating us all to rethink our consumptive habits to save the planet before it succumbs to the slow death of un-concern.

About the Author