Marketing With Digital Ecology In Mind

Imagine a suburban retail hellscape area.

If you're in the US, there's a good chance you don't live far from one. If you're outside the US, imagine whatever you think the US looks like.

In this suburban retail area, there's a four-lane highway with traffic lights every quarter mile or so. On both sides of the road are strip malls. There are chain hotels, chain restaurants, chain grocery stores, and chain superstores. Maybe some of it is trendy and high-end. Maybe not.

There are empty storefronts, too. Rundown used car dealerships and dollar stores. You might even see a for-profit dialysis center and an urgent care clinic.

Now, imagine the internet.

Perhaps your favorite social media platform. Do you see the strip malls? The four-lane highway? The chain everything vying for a piece of your wallet? Do you see the urgent care and the dollar stores? The empty storefronts with overgrown bushes?

I do. I see a lot of similarities between the environment we inhabit online and the environment we inhabit offline. We're making many of the same mistakes for the same reasons.

But there's good news.

I can do very little to change the suburban retail hellscape area outside my small town. But I can do quite a lot to change my digital environment. I can change who (or what) I follow. I can change what I make and what I share. Every action (or non-action) I take on the internet can help nurture the digital environment in the direction I'd like to see it go.

I can be a digital ecologist, an attention steward.

I can make the internet I want to inhabit.

What would your ideal internet be like? Your ideal media environment?

Digital Ecology

Digital Ecosystem: the complex, interconnected system of people, platforms, and media that form and maintain the digital spaces we inhabit

The internet is a digital ecosystem.

And like many ecosystems around the globe, it's showing signs of extreme dysregulation. From disinformation to bullshit to the never-ending ads and comically predictable self-promotion, the inhabitants of the digital ecosystem are on edge. We're on high alert for extreme weather. And we're growing much more cautious about how we use our resources.

I’m focusing on digital ecology not because I believe in a separation between the online world and the offline world, what Nathan Jurgenson has dubbed “digital dualism.” I’m focusing on digital ecology because we have incredible tools for producing media and connecting with people in digital spaces.

And since a huge part of “doing” marketing is producing media and connecting with people, that seems like the place to focus. Because I don’t subscribe to digital dualism, I also believe that creating digital ecology practices in the way we create marketing (or other media) will have a positive impact in non-digital spaces.

Value Extraction: mining or collecting a naturally occurring resource, treating it as private property, and offering it for sale as a product

Examples: oil, minerals, labor, attention

Now, the digital ecosystem, just like the physical ecosystems we inhabit, faces the constant threat of over-extraction and over-exploitation of its resources.

If you're a marketer (and I assume you're some kind of marketer since you're reading this), the story you've been told about social media is “grow an audience so you can sell to them.” This is (almost?) no different from “find a pocket of oil and drill.” The downstream effects of millions of people using the internet as a gold mine make it hard to survive—let alone thrive—in this environment. The air is thick with pollutants. The water is contaminated. The climate grows hotter. 

We know this rate of environmental destruction can’t continue apace. But we continue to say, “Drill, baby, drill!”

Artist Jenny Odell put it this way in her book How to Do Nothing:

Attention Stewardship: taking responsibility for the impact what one creates and shares online has on others' attention resources

Just as practices like logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose ‘production’ slowly destroys the soil until nothing more can grow. As it extinguishes one species of thought after another, it hastens the erosion of attention.

If we want to be part of making the internet a great place to live and work again, we need to take responsibility for the part we’ve played in making it what it is today.

“What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual," writes botanist and citizen of the Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall-Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass.

In what ways does the digital ecosystem feel out of balance?

Digital Strip Mining

There's a rock quarry not far from my house. I drive past it on a regular basis. "Rock quarry" sounds quaint—it papers over the fact that it's basically a strip mine. It's a giant hole dug layer by layer into the ground so that the company that owns it can make gravel.

Like every rock quarry I've lived near (a few), it's surrounded by a dense line of massive trees. Driving at normal speeds, you have to really pay attention to see the pit. To the casual observer, it just looks like a wooded, fenced-in area.

Digital Strip Mining: the practice of hiding unsustainable attention extraction behind a facade of "value" or "community"

Many of our digital spaces have received the same treatment. And you might have even participated in some digital strip mining yourself (I have). On the outside, things look nice enough. You share generously and "connect" with your followers. But look a little more closely, and there it is—an open pit for extracting a valuable resource from the ground.

For example, I'm sure you've had the experience of coming across a free ebook or course for learning... something. You fork over your email address to get it, only to discover that it's incomplete—a mere teaser for something that costs anywhere between $200-2000.

When have you experienced or participated in digital strip mining?

Digital strip mining also disrupts our experience of our social spaces online.

When every interaction is feeding some presumed quid pro quo, we're less likely to interact. We post and run. We protect our attention with little regard for others' attention.

Unplugging or quitting social media has gained a morally superior status. It's a way to signal that you're above the fray. Similarly, the "cool kids" become early adopters of new platforms, venturing into an unspoiled wilderness before strip mall developers get there and ruin everything.

As concepts, “wilderness” and “the offline” are deeply enmeshed. Both offer mythologies of ahistoricity and unaccountability, an escape clause from the dilemmas of a globalized world. They cloak themselves in the language of embodiment (the wind in your hair, the sand under your feet), while offering up the fantasy of moving through the world without a digital or ecological footprint, as a little wisp of pure soul. Together — in setting up a binaristic opposition between the corrupted, connected, digital self on the one hand, and the pure, wild, disconnected self on the other — they pose major obstacles to thinking through the complexity of human-technological-ecological relations.

— Lauren Collee, "The Great Offline"

I want to argue that we have so much more to gain by staying put and cleaning up the mess we've made online than we do by migrating to the next blue ocean.

We have more to gain by reengaging than by disengaging.

How would we rebuild so that we could live in harmony with each other and the digital environment?

What would a digital environment you want to engage with look like and feel like? How do your current marketing efforts contribute to or extract from that type of environment?

Ultimately, I think we must stop asking: What can I get from the internet? And instead, consider how we can live and work together, stewarding the incredible resources in the digital ecosystem.