Do Cyborgs Understand Mushrooms?Rethinking Media from the Perspective of Multi-Species Ethnography
The development of artificial intelligence technologies has prompted media researchers to focus on future cyborgs and avatars,while neglecting the relationship between human beings and existing life,especially the relationship that revolves around media.Whether it is animals,plants,fungi,bacteria,or nature as a whole,a two-way(or even multi-way)process of domestication has long been established with humans,resulting in the formation of clusters of relationships that cross species boundaries.The media is located as the central element of this relational complex,constructing places,producing and reproducing niches,facilitating affective flows,forming temporal sequences,and at the same time acting as an apparatus,creating unequal divisions among the conditions of life.In the new era of Anthropocene,multi-species ethnographic researches redefine the status of human being and also rethink the relationship between human being and a plurality of species,thus opening up new potentials for understanding media.This paper sorts out what multi-species ethnography has to say about media,with a particular focus on the key question of how species relations unfold through media.The paper proposes three key points as universal language,perspective shifting and cross-sensory transcoding as new dimensions of cross-species media,and it is in this de-anthropocentric unfolding that species,including humans,have the potential to move towards new relationships.
media anthropologymulti-species ethnographyAnthropocenecyborgsrhizomesartificial intelligence
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