Wild Blue Media

Reviewed by: Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawaterby Melody Jue Rachel Webb Jekanowski Media, Underwater. Melody Jue. Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater. Duke UP, 2020. 240 pp. $99.95 hc, $25.95 pbk. It can be estranging for terrestrial readers to read and write about the sea. Melody Jue's compelling new monograph Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawaterfocuses on the ocean's ability to disorient and displace, using [End Page 178]seawater to challenge the terrestrial biases in media theory and philosophy. Positioning the ocean as a "horizon of possibility" (xi) for human thought, Jue underlines the importance of embodiment, perception, and mediation to the ways in which scholars, artists, and writers engage with underwater worlds. Melody Jue is the recipient of the 2021 Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science Book Award from the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) for Wild Blue Media. This recognition is well deserved, as the monograph makes important contributions to a wide range of fields, including (but not limited to): media studies, the emerging interdisciplinary field of ocean studies or "blue humanities," literary theory, science and technology studies, and sf studies. Like the wider field of the blue humanities, Wild Blue Mediaseeks to shift critical inquiry from land-based environments to the planet's expansive seas. In doing so, Jue participates in a growing conversation about the ways media theory accounts for physical environments, including in such works as John Durham Peters's The Marvelous Clouds(U of Chicago P, 2015), Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker's Sustainable Media(Routledge, 2016), and Sean Cubitt's Finite Media(Duke UP, 2017). Jue's rhetorical and theoretical emphasis on disorientation runs throughout the monograph, framing her methodological intervention as well as her engagement with sf studies. Jue begins the introduction with an anecdote about an early dive in North Carolina's Outer Banks. She reflects: "I quickly realized that becoming a good diver was going to require extensive rehabituation.... It would be some time before, as Jacques Cousteau once put it, I would experience my 'flesh feeling what the fish scales know'" (2). This sets up an analogy between the disorienting experience of learning to scuba dive and the process of displacing land-based understandings of direction, movement, and transmission within Western media theory. She argues that this process of rehabitation for a new diver from "terrestrial habits of movements and orientation" to ways of being underwater can be adapted to the theorization of media. As a "wild" and nonhuman environment, the ocean can be used to strain and expand habituated understandings of depth, direction, light, and sound (xii). Jue uses this milieu to "test" the limits of media—radio, newspapers, telephones, computers, satellites, cinema—as well as human perception (xi). Seawater can activate theory's "sensitivity to the role of the milieu" (2) through both its unique properties (salinity, pressure, increased density, coldness, electrical conductivity) and the ways in which artists, writers, and activists have engaged with specific oceans in their work. Jue describes this intervention as a "milieu-specific analysis": a way of identifying how ways of thinking about communication and the world develop in relation to one's environment (3). Changing this environment can help to shift forms of thought and raise new questions. Engaging with embodiment and milieu in this way, Jue's method uses self-reflexivity as well as theories of situated knowledge in feminist science studies (see Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, Routledge 1991). [End Page 179] Metaphors of submission, disorientation, and estrangement from scuba diving frame each of the book's four chapters. In the first three, Jue imaginatively "submerges" (her word) a concept from media studies—interface, inscription, and database—into the ocean to investigate how our understanding shifts within a new milieu (5). This methodology of "conceptual displacement" is strongly informed by the tools of cognitive estrangement and extrapolation offered by sf. According to Jue: "the utopian and science fictional impulse of this book is to explore the ocean as a force for conceptual reorientations that sometimes estranges what we thought was familiar" (5). As a "science fictional strategy" (4), this methodology hinges on a speculative thought experiment: what happens if

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