Ecomedia studies refers to the discipline within the environmental humanities that examines the way media systems and artifacts are embedded in ecological relationships. In one sense, the media in ecomedia designates the tools of mass communication already associated with the term. But ecomedia studies insists that media are not just text, image, and sound transmitted through machines, not just the technologies of transmission, but the social and material relationships that make transmission possible. As opposed to the older discipline of media studies, "ecomedia" understands these relationships as a kind of agency beyond the immediate cultural purposes of mediated content. Ecomedia is also distinct from the older concept of media ecologies, which employs ecology as a metaphor for the way media embed themselves in social systems and coproduce social relationships. One may analyze the media ecology of Instagram as an agent of selfie production, but unless that analysis includes an understanding of Instagram's ecological effects, it is not an ecomedia analysis. In its emphasis on the materiality and agency of media in the biosphere, ecomedia studies distinguishes itself as an aspect of environmental humanism's drive beyond a merely human world.