The Fibreculture Journal‘s Unnatural Ecologies issue, guest edited by Michael Goddard and Jussi Parikka, is now online.

Media ecology has always resonated with discussions of digital and networked media. Perhaps this is because the discipline of media ecology has always been so open to transdisciplinary work. The pioneers of media ecology set off very early on the road to transdiscplinary critique that is a key focus for the Fibreculture Journal. Indeed, media ecological critique is often critique in the best sense: the exploration of the limits, not just the errors of thinking, the immersion of thought in real events and practices, and the creation of new ideas appropriate to the present and future of media. All in all, from Innis and McLuhan on, media ecology has provided a generative engine within media thinking and practice. Indeed it has been exemplary thinking as practice.

Yet the leading scholars writing for the Unnatural Ecologies issue do not perform media ecology as we have known it. At times the articles argue with more “traditional” media ecology. Sometimes, they arrive at a new media ecology, having travelled other trajectories that those of traditional media ecology. They are rewriting media ecology, exploring its limits from inside and outside. In the process the Fibreculture Journal believes this issue makes a crucial contribution to thinking about all media from the perspective of digital and networked media. In thinking through the unnatural ecologies that contemporary media make increasingly obvious, the issue challenges us to rethink not only what media are, or what they do, but what they might have been, and what they have done.

So we warmly welcome issue 17 of the Fibreculture Journal, and express our gratitude to Michael Goddard and Jussi Parikka, the issue’s editors.

This issue also marks another leap forward for us as a journal. You can now download the entire issue with one click, as well as individual articles—and you can do so in ePub as well as pdf. Many thanks to Mat Wall-Smith, our Journal Manager for this and so much else. FCJ would not be alive—and happily alive—today without him.

We have four forthcoming issues in process at the moment: Trans, Ubiquity, Affect in Interaction Design, and Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures. Our recent CFPs have drawn very large responses, and although we do not have a current CFP open, we will soon. Many thanks to all our authors and readers (and of course our many referees!) for supported the Fibreculture Journal.