The marvelous clouds

Today, the word "cloud" more often refers to data storage and computer networks than to weather. John Durham Peters, a media scholar, treats this shared vocabulary as evidence that the natural and technological worlds are less separate than they appear. He suggests that we usually think of media as the environments we live in, but environments can just as readily be understood as media.

Peters uses "media" broadly, to mean any element that helps make up the human world. Drawing on media philosophy, he argues that media are not merely channels for messages. They are infrastructures, joining nature and culture, that let human life flourish. His examples range widely, from the oceans to the sky.

A central claim is that digital media extend much older practices, including taming fire, keeping calendars, reading the stars, developing language, and founding religions. Rather than leading us into unexplored territory, new media return us to the oldest questions of society and ecology: how people manage their relationships with themselves, with one another, and with the natural world.

The book moves across many human efforts to cope with existence, from navigation and farming to meteorology and search engines. It shows how media sit at the center of our dealings with the world around us, and it asks readers to notice the everyday foundations of life on earth that are easy to take for granted.