Unnatural Ecologies: The Metaphor of the Environment in Media Theory

"Alive in the Sea of Information"

The concept of "media ecology" relies on a metaphorical transfer that media theorists took over from urban sociology, where "human ecology" had in its turn developed out of a translation of categories from biological ecology. I would like to begin by exploring some of the implications of this double transfer obliquely, by way of a literary rather than a theoretical text: Gary Snyder's poem "Walking the New York Bedrock" (1987). In this poem, Snyder describes the densely populated and artificial environment of Manhattan in terms of natural metaphors that assimilate it to a biological ecosystem. At a literal level, he points to the natural organisms that inhabit the city, from the "spiderwebs, fungus, lichen" of subway tunnels to birds and gingko trees in parks and streets; metaphorically, he compares the movement of visitors in Manhattan's art museums to that of fish or planets, the back and forth of helicopters "[t]rading pollen and nectar" to that of insects, and the stratified human habitats, from the street level of the homeless to the top floors of skyscrapers, to plant growth of varying heights in a forest, the top ones being exposed to more sunlight and thereby able to perform "[m]ore photosynthesis." ¹

Even though many of the individual metaphorical transfers between city and nature that Snyder performs are amusing and innovative, the overall idea of the city as organism is hardly original. One of the metaphors that is most insistently repeated in the poem, however, goes a step beyond simply considering urban space on its own as a more or less functional organism; several times, Snyder compares New York City to a living creature that is itself part of a larger ecosystem:

Glass, aluminum, aggregate gravel,
Iron. Stainless steel.
Hollow honeycomb brain-buildings owned by

Columbia University, the landlord of
Anemone
    colony
Alive, in the Sea of Information (p. 98)

In the first stanza, the verbless juxtaposition of nouns and the paired alliterations—glass/gravel, aluminum/aggregate, stainless/steel, hollow/honeycomb, brain/buildings—both typical of Snyder's descriptive style, convey a sense of the rock-solid materiality and architectonic constructedness of the buildings he observes, even as the last line of this stanza transposes this constructedness from the hardness of iron and steel to the softer and "hollow" one of bees building a hive with wax and honey. At the same time, the metaphor of the "brain-buildings" designates the university as the brain of the organism that is the city. But the next stanza subtly transmutes this image of the beehive city with a university brain to a different one, casting the city in its entirety as only a cluster of organisms in a much larger habitat: again modulating the metaphor with alliterations ("Columbia/colony," "anemone/alive"), Snyder here portrays New York City as just one set of marine organisms, a "colony" in a much wider and more abstract network of connections, the "Sea of Information" constituted by flows of data across the country and the globe. Clearly, the diffuseness and fluidity that this metaphor implies stand in stark contrast to the self-confident materiality of the built environment in the previous stanza: however much the architectural surface of the city may impress the observer with its massive solidity and clear boundaries, its "aliveness" is grounded in the informational and economic "liquidity" that merges it with the invisible environment surrounding it.

On one occasion, Snyder substitutes for the "Sea of Information" the "Sea of Economy" (p. 99), another national and international network of connections and transfers. At the end of the poem, he returns to the image of information-exchange flows as a kind of liquid habitat:

    Soft liquid silver,
Beautiful buildings we float in, we feed in,
    Foam, steel, gray
Alive in the Sea of Information. (p. 102)

The techniques deployed here resemble those of the stanza quoted earlier—heavy alliteration ("soft...