'The Marvelous Clouds' By John Durham Peters

In reflection to the reading ‘The Marvelous Clouds’, author John Durham Peters discusses the relationship between media and nature. Author Peters claims that “The irreversible threat to our habitat by climate-change and the explosion of digital devices, of both carbon overload in the atmosphere and the superabundant data in the ‘cloud’” (Peters 1). In other words, he believes both media and nature are related forces and therefore both are at blame for global warming. Within the reading, Peters elaborates on the issues of climate change in relation to media theory as he believes that nature itself is a medium. The main idea of the introduction and Chapter – Understand Media was the philosophy of climate acting as a communicator. As well, Peters focuses a portion of Chapter 1 on infrastructure and Infrastructural concealment. All of these topics are important …show more content…
The definition of media he defines as “Media, I will are vessels and environment, container of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible” (Peters 2). He also describes media as not only a utility but a means of communication. Nature, he defines as a place “untouched by humans and only exists on earth where humans have chosen to set it apart as natural” (Peters 3). Nature is considered to be a medium due the relationship of traits that is shared with media. Nature is a medium due to the way it communicates with humans and the environment. Author John Peters, uses the example that clouds communicate with us he states “if we mean repositories of readable data and processes that sustain and enable existence, then of course clouds have meaning” (Peters 4). In other terms, author Peters believes that nature is able to communicate through non traditional means of communication such as weather forecasting, data, and global