As global warming was questioned and de-prioritized during the George W. Bush presidency, the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow functioned as a reactionary and visceral cinematic discourse, enlivening environmental efforts to address humanity’s influence on global warming. Demonstrated through analysis using Gilles Deleuze’s three-part movement-images as an analytic approach, the film uses familiar settings such as Los Angeles and New York City as perception-images. The action-image demonstrations of nature’s wrath and violence in those settings are accompanied with scientists being pardoned by nature and as they are able to walk unscathed into and through natural disasters. Finally, the affection-images display humanity’s terrifyingly enraptured facial expressions when confronting global warming-caused natural disasters. As the film leaves a bleak outcome for humanity under the context of global warming denial, it simultaneously employs an ecotheological discourse in the early twenty-first century to empower global warming prediction, demonstrative of the growth of the theological shift in visual display of global warming rhetoric.

When new technologies emerge, they inevitably bring to mind many of the same questions that media scholars have been asking for decades. In this study, we will analyse Apple AirPods through a theoretical framework based in the writings of media ecologists like Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, as well as media theorist Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno is included here because very few articles in media ecology scholarship discuss his contributions to media research. The exclusion of Adorno from media ecology appears to relate to his different ontological assumptions about media. While Innis, McLuhan and Postman contribute to the ‘structures and patterns narrative’ of medium theory, Adorno clearly fits into the ‘power and resistance narrative’ of critical/cultural studies. However, there are more significant connections between Adorno and the field of media ecology than have been previously acknowledged. In particular, there is a confluence between Adorno’s writings and others by media ecology scholars like Postman and Lewis Mumford, particularly in Adorno’s arguments about technology and music. In this article, we consider the question: can Adorno’s writings on technology be considered appropriate for inclusion in the media ecology canon? In this article, we will explore representative essays from Adorno’s extensive body of work on music reproduction technologies and discuss the parallels between his arguments and those made by others in media ecology.

Predating the current billionaire space race, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus explores an interplay of competing explanations of the origins of life as discoverable in the universe through space exploration. The film’s plot debates evolution versus faith as life’s origins, and demonstrates evolution as victorious over and utilizing faith. Accompanying this analysis is focus on the film’s previously released online prologue scene, a fictional TED Talk that intertwines technological advancements and religious themes that display a brutal Darwinian survival of the fittest hierarchy as the answer to life’s origins. In the age of re- emerging space exploration, Prometheus and its social media-released prologue oration demonstrate technological control over evolution and relegate faith to functioning as a survival mechanism in response to superior and hyperaggressive species. Faith’s value is in assisting humanity to continually seek transcendent answers when confronting life’s beginnings and violent endings.

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