Towards a Memo-Techno-Ecology: Mediating Memories of Extreme Flooding in Resilient Communities

Abstract

In Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet (2013), Garde-Hansen and Gorton textually analyse the online debates around climate change media that entangle the threat of bad weather with fears over race relations, war and political dissent. Drawing upon Brian Massumi’s work, which combines extreme weather and war into a discursively connected ‘threat-form’ of ‘the suddenly irrupting, locally self-organizing, system- ically self-amplifying threat of large-scale disruption’ (2011, p. 20), the authors propose the concept of an emo-techno-ecology. This addresses the way these changing-environment fears exist ‘trans-medially’ as well as at ‘hyper-local’ levels. Thus, they argue that ‘we need to understand our mediated ecology along two wavelengths simultaneously: as local and global emotions’ or as ‘global emo-scapes’ in which citizens are affectively connected to their environment as ‘technologically enabled infotainment producers/consumers’ (2013, p. 128). More broadly, Brace and Geoghegan (2011), writing in the context of human geography, argue that climate change is encountered holistically, not just in how it is understood ‘top-down’ through the communication of scientific discourses but relationally at a local level:

Climate change can be observed in relation to landscape but also felt, sensed, apprehended emotionally as part of the fabric of everyday life in which acceptance, denial, resignation and action co-exist as personal and social responses to the local manifestations of a global problem.

(Brace & Geoghegan, 2011, p. 284)