Overview

In Wild Blue Media, Melody Jue destabilizes terrestrial-based ways of knowing and reorients our perception of the world by considering the ocean itself as a media environment-a place where the weight and opacity of seawater transforms how information is created, stored, transmitted, and perceived. By recentering media theory on and under the sea, Jue calls attention to the differences between perceptual environments and how we think within and through them as embodied observers. In doing so, she provides media studies with alternatives to familiar theoretical frameworks, thereby challenging scholars to navigate unfamiliar oceanic conditions of orientation, materiality, and saturation. Jue not only examines media about the ocean-science fiction narratives, documentary films, ocean data visualizations, animal communication methods, and underwater art-but reexamines media through the ocean, submerging media theory underwater to estrange it from terrestrial habits of perception while reframing our understanding of mediation, objectivity, and metaphor.

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9781478006978

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Reviews

'Blood is seawater, ' said the French biologist Rene Quinton more than a century ago. Melody Jue shows that seawater can be the lifeblood of a new 'milieu-specific' analysis that discards terrestrial biases in understanding media. Navigating across topics such as iron lungs, squid skin, and Google maps of the ocean floor, this book invites us to let our thinking go productively wild by transcending our lazily land-based concepts via a deep dive into the wet blue yonder. --John Durham Peters, Yale University Melody Jue's bracing and brilliant Wild Blue Media invites readers to reorient their terrestrially tuned assumptions about media by dunking such notions as inscription, storage, and transmission underwater, into the multiplicitous materialities of the oceanic. Jue teaches us the vital lesson that by rethinking the medium of the ocean through media theory--and vice versa--we may better apprehend the sea changes of our fraught, climate-changing time. --Stefan Helmreich, author of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond

"“‘Blood is seawater,’ said the French biologist René Quinton more than a century ago. Melody Jue shows that seawater can be the lifeblood of a new ‘milieu-specific’ analysis that discards terrestrial biases in understanding media. Navigating across topics such as iron lungs, squid skin, and Google maps of the ocean floor, this book invites us to let our thinking go productively wild by transcending our lazily land-based concepts via a deep dive into the wet blue yonder.” -- John Durham Peters, Yale University “Melody Jue's bracing and brilliant Wild Blue Media invites readers to reorient their terrestrially tuned assumptions about media by dunking such notions as inscription, storage, and transmission underwater, into the multiplicitous materialities of the oceanic. Jue teaches us the vital lesson that by rethinking the medium of the ocean through media theory—and vice versa—we may better apprehend the sea changes of our fraught, climate-changing time.” -- Stefan Helmreich, author of * Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond * “Forging an innovative speculative methodology of ‘conceptual displacement’, the book configures oceanic immersion as a critical and imaginative resource for thinking otherwise.... Wild Blue Media embarks upon a vital reassessment of the parameters through which media studies and literary criticism mediate oceanic knowledge.” -- Alexandra Campbell * Wasafiri * ""I love how this book beckons us to new depths in its pursuit of a defamiliarization that might hold ameliorating potential for the planet and those who dwell on it. . . . Wild Blue Media aims to jolt its readers out of accustomed habits of perception, and for me, creating the conditions for such heightened sensitivity is what teaching is all about."" -- Sari Edelstein * Edge Effects * “Wild Blue Media makes an important and timely contribution to the oceanic turn within literary theory and media studies. Notably for a monograph focused on mediation, the book is also a beautiful object. Jue’s skill and passion for diving inform the volume’s design as well as her contributions to media theory.” -- Rachel Webb Jekanowski * Science Fiction Studies * “Wild Blue Media . . . is a gift to the ocean humanities, suturing concepts across media studies, literary criticism, oceanographic research, feminist science, and technology studies and visual culture with formidable deftness.” -- Pujita Guha * Configurations * “Jue’s sophisticated theorizing is combined with an ethical commitment to care for the ocean, and she refers to Wild Blue Media as a pre-activist book. . . . Jue’s book will hopefully inspire scholars and activists to immerse themselves into underwater worlds, and show people above the surface what a wonderful world of many worlds our pluriversal blue planet is.” -- Paula Uimonen * Anthropology Book Forum *"

Author Information

Melody Jue is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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