Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater by Melody Jue (review)

Abstract

The image on the cover of Melody Jue’s book Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater intimates many of the book’s themes: views from inside the ocean that put media scholarship in the cool bluegreen light of the underwater, representations of sensory immersion and intimacy that demonstrate the value of learning from unfamiliar realms, and milieuspecific planetary understandings enabled by scuba diving and the “cognitive estrangement” it engenders.1 Jue’s exciting book advances ecological ethics by exploring oceans as environments for thinking beyond the conventions and habits of human experience on land. It argues that by experiencing the buoyancy of oceans, the limitations of humancentered perspectives, acculturated by gravity on land, are critically challenged. An interest in attuning to planetary entanglements is identified early on when Jue evokes Jacques Cousteau’s curiosity as a diver for his “flesh feeling what the fish scales know.”2 But the book is also about rethinking media theory through an embodied perspective in the fluidity of ocean water. Consequently, the first three chapters are divided into “interface,” “inscription,” and “database,” media concepts that become defamiliarized when submerged in the materiality of the pressure, fluidity, and salinity of oceans, while the fourth chapter on “underwater museums”