Introduction

Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places charts media practices developed from analogue technologies as they migrate to the ones for digital media and digital networks. Conventional definitions of film, photography, television, and video no longer make sense as distinct media, given accelerated developments in digital technology and radically different ways of harnessing these technologies around the world. Comparably, the terms multimedia, interactive, and screen no longer make sense in ways that they once might have, nor do other terms from analogue media ecologies, such as animation, documentary, experimental, narrative, or so-called hybrid forms. Digital media ecologies are increasingly based on explorations of code and user interface; interrogations of archives, databases, and networks; production via automated scraping, filtering, cloning, and recombinatory techniques; applications of user-generated content (UGC) layers; crowdsourcing ideas on social-media platforms; narrowcasting digital selves on “free” websites that claim copyright; and provocative performances that implicate audiences as participants.