At the Crossroads of Media and the Environment — A New Course Explores the Impact of Communication on the Planet
Postdoctoral fellows Matt Parker and Ennuri Jo led students in a search for the internet beyond screens.
It’s a cold afternoon in February at an electronic waste processing facility in Grays Ferry, Philadelphia. Students from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania walked around a warehouse full of discarded laptops, televisions, chargers, fax machines, smartphones, and other electronics ready to be recycled. Lithium-ion batteries are being prepared for shredding, while hard drives are wiped of data.
This field trip is part of the Annenberg course, “Media, Infrastructures, and the Environment,” which had undergraduates explore the relationship between humans, media technologies, and the environment. From satellite networks and fiber-optic cables to the idea of “the cloud,” students explored how media infrastructures shape — and are shaped by — the planet’s resources and ecosystems.
On a bus to the facility, Communication and Philosophy major Gabriel Jung (C‘26) held his camera, ready to document the trip. He said the course led him to start thinking about all of the infrastructure behind the internet that he previously overlooked, from underground cables to data farms.
“By looking at the electronics we all discard, students see first hand the impact of media technology on the environment,” said Gilbert Seldes Multimodal Postdoctoral Fellow Matt Parker, who co-taught the class with Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication Postdoctoral Fellow Ennuri Jo. “This one facility alone processes two million pounds of e-waste a year. As humans, we’re always trying to tell stories, but what we use to tell those stories, from televisions to ChatGPT, has different impacts on the natural world.”
Philadelphia as a Living Laboratory
This trip was just one of many that students took during the fall semester. Students also made the Penn campus their classroom, identifying the internet infrastructure in University City and making a map of the internet beyond screens. On a tour of campus guided by Jo and Parker, Communication major Reed Farrell (C‘26) pointed out a manhole cover marked with the word “COMMUNICATION,” and added a point on the classroom’s shared Google Map, an atlas of internet infrastructure on campus. These covers usually point to the presence of underground fiber-optic cables, Jo told the class.
“We often think of network society and media technologies as immaterial, but they very much have a material presence and are deeply entangled with the natural and manmade environment,” Jo said. “The trip was meant to see how the actual components of media infrastructures are embedded in our immediate surroundings and literally shape our daily life at Penn.”
During the outing, the group climbed to the roof of a parking garage to search for antennas powering satellite connections, observed a massive cooling tower for chilling electronics, and stopped outside of the Bell Telephone Building, a granite-facade 1920s building once home to one of the famed company’s telephone exchange systems. The building now houses servers owned by Verizon. Parker invited students to get close to the door and listen to the sounds of the data center.
For Parker, an environmental humanities and sound studies scholar, the noise of these machines is the latest in a timeline of sounds of communication in Philadelphia.
“Philadelphia is a city built on communication,” noted Parker. “From colonial printing presses to the first computers and telephones, this city has always been shaped by media — and the materials that support these devices.”
Thinking and Making
Midway through the semester, Parker taught students how to solder electromagnetic listening devices, so that they could tune into the sounds made by 5G mobile networks and other communications infrastructure that they cannot hear with just their ears.
“In our course, we tried to give students sensorial and embodied access to infrastructure,” said Parker. “When we solder circuits to listen to electromagnetic fields, they don’t just learn about infrastructures — they sense them. This hands-on engagement turns abstract ideas into lived experience, revealing how our digital lives ripple through and reshape the material world.”
The course culminated in a creative multimodal project: students imagined their hometown or the city of Philadelphia transformed into a new environment, whether that was a different type of climate, submerged underwater, or something else entirely. They were instructed to imagine what this new environment feels like, how it operates, and what kind of infrastructure is in place. Each student designed a creative work that conveyed a vision for future media in that environment.
Students blended words, illustrations, physical artifacts, and more to create their projects. Jung’s final project was a teardown of an iPhone, presented as if it were an archaeological museum artifact in the future, while Urban Studies major Anna Hochman (C‘25) created a zine titled “Fogged in: life in the nebulocene” about life in a future San Francisco where the fog never lifts. Communication and Public Health double major Cassandra Owei (C‘25) made a website that exposes the environmental impact of everyday internet and technology usage, with designs that interrupt the user experience.
A New Frontier in Communication Studies
The course compelled students to investigate the world around them and consider how this world is affected by the communication tools we use, from the materials that make up our phones and computers to the resources used by server farms and data centers, and even the noise of a connected city.
“It’s imperative for students to understand how the way we communicate affects the environment we live in,” Parker said. Jo agreed: “We’re living in a world where we’re constantly connected, and that has an impact on our planet.”
