The Socio-Ecological Black Box of Digital Media Technologies: An Invisible Sustainability Issue in Pre-Service Teachers’ Media Practices

The socio-ecological costs of digital media technologies—resource extraction, energy-intensive infrastructures, and electronic waste—remain largely invisible in everyday life and in education. Drawing on practice theory and science and technology studies on opacity, this article introduces the “black-box problem” as an analytical lens for understanding why digital technologies are so rarely enacted as objects of sustainability concern. Distinct from the algorithmic black box, which concerns the opacity of code and data, the socio-ecological black box concerns the opacity of the material and social relations that a digital device or service presupposes. This study is based on a qualitative analysis of 23 semi-structured interviews with pre-service teachers across five higher-education sites in Germany, coded using Grounded Theory procedures and interpreted along practice theoretical lines. The findings show that the black box operates across four interlocking dimensions—production, use, disposal, and the absence of recognisable alternatives—and that the same pre-service teachers who reason competently about sustainable food, mobility, and clothing largely lack ecological categories with which to evaluate digital devices and services. This pattern is domain-specific and is not adequately explained by individual disinterest or by a general lack of sustainability knowledge. Read through accounts of digital capitalist externalisation, weak public discourse, and missing regulation, it is interpreted here as a structurally produced blind spot rather than as an individual knowledge deficit. For Education for Sustainable Development and media education, the implications are direct: pre-service teachers, as future multipliers, require infrastructural literacy that renders the material substrate of the digital available for critical, action-oriented reflection.