Mary Joyce (ed.): Digital Activism Decoded. The New Mechanics of Change (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, facebook, mass media, media activism, social movements, twitter, web 2.0
The media have recently been abuzz with cases of citizens around the world using digital technologies to push for social and political change—from the use of Twitter to amplify protests in Iran and Moldova to the thousands of American nonprofits creating Facebook accounts in the hopes of luring supporters.
These stories have been published, discussed, extolled, and derided, but the underlying mechanics of the practice of digital activism are little understood. This new field, its dynamics, practices, misconceptions, and possible futures are presented together for the first time in Digital Activism Decoded.
Topics include:
* how to think about digital activism
* the digital activism environment: infrastructure, social, political, and economic factors
* digital activism practices: two research perspectives and the danger of destructive activism
* digital activism’s value: balancing optimism and pessimism
* building the future of digital activism
Publisher: International Debate Education Association, New York, June 2010
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License BY-NC 3.0 US.
ISBN 978-1-932716-60-3
228 pages
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Heather Urbanski (ed.): Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · blogging, mass media, popular culture, reality television, rhetorics, writing, youth
Is it true that, in this era of digitization and mass media, reading and writing are on the decline? In a thought-provoking collection of essays and profiles, 30 contributors explore what may instead be a rise in rhetorical activity, an upsurge due in part to the sudden blurring of the traditional roles of creator and audience in participatory media. This collection explores topics too often overlooked by traditional academic scholarship, though critical to an exploration of rhetoric and popular culture, including fan fiction, reality television, blogging, online role-playing games, and Fantasy Football. Both scholarly and engaging, this text draws rhetorical studies into the digital age.
Publisher McFarland & Co Inc Pub, 2010
ISBN 0786437200, 9780786437207
David Holmes: Communication Theory. Media, Technology and Society (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · communication, community, cyberspace, internet, mass media, technology, theory of communication, virtual communities
This book offers an introduction to communication theory that is appropriate to our post-broadcast, interactive media environment. The author contrasts the ‘first media age’ of broadcast with the ’second media age’ of interactivity.
Communication Theory argues that the different kinds of communication dynamics found in cyberspace demand a reassessment of the methodologies used to explore media, as well as new understandings of the concepts of interaction and community (virtual communities and broadcast communities).
The media are examined not simply in terms of content, but also in terms of medium and network forms. Holmes also explores the differences between analogue and digital cultures, and between cyberspace and virtual reality.
The book serves both as an upper level textbook for New Media courses and a good general guide to understanding the sociological complexities of the modern communications environment.
Publisher SAGE, 2005
ISBN 0761970703, 9780761970705
Length 255 pages
Manuel Castells: Communication Power (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · business, communication, global warming, internet, mass media, network society, neuroscience, politics, technology, youtube
We live in the midst of a revolution in communication technologies that affects the way in which people feel, think, and behave. The mass media (including web-based media), Manuel Castells argues, has become the space where political and business power strategies are played out; power now lies in the hands of those who understand or control communication.
Over the last thirty years, Castells has emerged as one of the world’s leading communications theorists. In this, his most far-reaching book for a decade, he explores the nature of power itself, in the new communications environment. His vision encompasses business, media, neuroscience, technology, and, above all, politics. His case histories include global media deregulation, the misinformation that surrounded the invasion of Iraq, environmental movements, the role of the internet in the Obama presidential campaign, and media control in Russia and China. In the new network society of instant messaging, social networking, and blogging–”mass self-communication”–politics is fundamentally media politics. This fact is behind a worldwide crisis of political legitimacy that challenges the meaning of democracy in much of the world.
Publisher Oxford University Press, 2009
ISBN 0199567042, 9780199567041
Length 571 pages
William Uricchio (ed.): We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · balkans, europe, european union, film, identity, imagined community, literature, mass media, photography, public broadcasting, television
This volume explores the relationship between media and identity along the fault-lines and fissures of the ever-shifting collectivities that constitute Europe. At the centre of this dynamic are human beings, who, as makers and users of media, negotiate identities, affiliations and meanings.
The collection explores how ethnicities, religions, tastes, generations and languages overlap one another, interact within individuals and define communities. Whether triggered by individual desires or shared fantasies, these dynamic collectivities make use of media in very different ways. Addressing topics such as films and television programmes, the Euro, photographs, postcards or public monuments, contributors reflect on this notion of ‘new collectivities’, not in an individualistic sense or collectively as nations but as multiple and shifting identities. With this as a starting point, the volume interrogates the processes that create and shape identity and characterize Europe as it physically expands and administratively consolidates. Essays explore media texts as sites of dreams and longed for identities, and articulate the fears and tensions surrounding the uses of transnational media, whether for purposes of cultural homogenization or isolation.
Drawing on novels, films and the press, the volume demonstrates the intricate interactions of history and memory as they inform and give shape to the present. We Europeans? Media, Representation, Identities addresses a scholarly readership with an interest in textual analysis and policy issues regarding media, identity and the many vantage points of Europe.
Publisher Intellect Books, 2009
Volume 6 of Changing media–changing Europe series
ISBN 1841502073, 9781841502076
Length 224 pages
Janet Staiger, Sabine Hake (eds.): Convergence Media History (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · convergence, film, mass media, media culture, media history, media studies, new media, television
Convergence Media History explores the ways that digital convergence has radically changed the field of media history. Writing media history is no longer a matter of charting the historical development of an individual medium such as film or television. Instead, now that various media from blockbuster films to everyday computer use intersect regularly via convergence, scholars must find new ways to write media history across multiple media formats. This collection of eighteen new essays by leading media historians and scholars examines the issues today in writing media history and histories. Each essay addresses a single medium—including film, television, advertising, sound recording, new media, and more—and connects that specific medium’s history to larger issues for the field in writing multi-media or convergent histories. Among the volume’s topics are new media technologies and their impact on traditional approaches to media history; alternative accounts of film production and exhibition, with a special emphasis on film across multiple media platforms; the changing relationships between audiences, fans, and consumers within media culture; and the globalization of our media culture.
Publisher Taylor and Francis, 2009
ISBN 0415996619, 9780415996617
Length 212 pages
Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler: Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews (2002)
Filed under book | Tags: · literature, mass media, media studies, philosophy, photography, recording, sociology, technology, teletechnologies, television
In this important book, Jacques Derrida talks with Bernard Stiegler about the effect of teletechnologies on our philosophical and political moment. Improvising before a camera, the two philosophers are confronted by the very technologies they discuss and so are forced to address all the more directly the urgent questions that they raise. What does it mean to speak of the present in a situation of “live” recording? How can we respond, responsibly, to a question when we know that the so-called “natural” conditions of expression, discussion, reflection, and deliberation have been breached?
As Derrida and Stiegler discuss the role of teletechnologies in modern society, the political implications of Derrida’s thought become apparent. Drawing on recent events in Europe, Derrida and Stiegler explore the impact of television and the internet on our understanding of the state, its borders and citizenship. Their discussion examines the relationship between the juridical and the technical, and it shows how new technologies for manipulating and transmitting images have influenced our notions of democracy, history and the body. The book opens with a shorter interview with Derrida on the news media, and closes with a provocative essay by Stiegler on the epistemology of digital photography.
In Echographies of Television, Derrida and Stiegler open up questions that are of key social and political importance. Their book will be of great interest to all those already familiar with Derrida’s work, as well as to students and scholars of philosophy, literature, sociology and media studies.
Table of Contents
Artifactualities: Jacques Derrida.
Echographies of Television: Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler.
Chapter 1 Right of Inspection.
Chapter 2 Artifactuality, Homohegemony.
Chapter 3 Acts of Memory: Topolitics and Teletechnology.
Chapter 4 Inheritances – and Rhythm.
Chapter 5 ‘Cultural Exception’: the States of the State, the Event.
Chapter 6 The Archive Market: Truth, Testimony, Evidence.
Chapter 7 Phonographies: Meaning – from Heritage to Horizon.
Chapter 8 Spectrographies.
Chapter 9 Vigilances of the Unconscious.
The Discrete Image: Bernard Stiegler.
Notes
Translated by Jennifer Bajorek
Publisher Polity Press, 2002
ISBN 0745620361, 9780745620367
Length 174 pages
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Comment (0)Mark Andrejevic: Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · audience, mass media, public broadcasting, reality tv, television
Drawing on cultural theory and interviews with fans, cast members and producers, this book places the reality TV trend within a broader social context, tracing its relationship to the development of a digitally enhanced, surveillance-based interactive economy and to a savvy mistrust of mediated reality in general. Surveying several successful reality TV formats, the book links the rehabilitation of “Big Brother” to the increasingly important economic role played by the work of being watched. The author enlists critical social theory to examine how the appeal of “the real” is deployed as a pervasive but false promise of democratization.
Publisher Rowman & Littlefield, 2004
Series: Critical Media Studies: Institutions, Politics, and Culture
ISBN 0742527484, 9780742527485
Length 253 pages
Terry Bolas: Screen Education: From Film Appreciation to Media Studies (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, education, film, film theory, mass media, media studies
Film and media studies now attract large numbers of students in schools, colleges and universities. However the setting up of these courses came after many decades of pioneering work at the educational margins in the post-war period. Bolas’ account focuses particularly on the voluntary efforts of activists in the Society for Education in Film and Television and on that Society’s interchanging relationship with the British Film Institute’s Education Department. It draws on recent interviews with many of the individuals who contributed to the raising of the status of film, TV and media study. Through detailed examination of the scattered but surviving documentary record, the author seeks to challenge versions of the received history.
Publisher Intellect Books, 2009
ISBN 1841502375, 9781841502373
Length 384 pages
Naomi Sakr (ed.): Women and Media in The Middle East. Power Through Self-expression (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · civil society, feminism, film, gender, islam, journalism, literacy, mass media, middle east, public broadcasting
Is today’s changing media landscape in the Middle East empowering women? This is the first book to address the dynamics of media ecology and women’s advancement in the contemporary Middle East. The book spans both the region and media forms, from Iran’s women’s press, via Maghrebi women filmmakers and Egyptian political films, Palestinian TV and Hezbollah’s TV station, Al-Manar. It takes as its starting point the diverse experiencees and multi-layered identities of women and treats media institutions and practices as part of wider power relations in society. By analysing media production, consumption and texts, it reveals where and how gender boundaries have been erected or crossed.
Publisher I.B.Tauris, 2004
Volume 41 of Library of modern Middle East studies
ISBN 1850435456, 9781850435457
Length 248 pages
Steve J. Wurtzler: Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · acoustics, audience, film, listening, mass media, music, sound, wireless networks
Electric Sounds brings to vivid life an era when innovations in the production, recording, and transmission of sound revolutionized a number of different media, especially the radio, the phonograph, and the cinema.
The 1920s and 1930s marked some of the most important developments in the history of the American mass media: the film industry’s conversion to synchronous sound, the rise of radio networks and advertising-supported broadcasting, the establishment of a federal regulatory framework on which U.S. communications policy continues to be based, the development of several powerful media conglomerates, and the birth of a new acoustic commodity in which a single story, song, or other product was made available to consumers in multiple media forms and formats.
But what role would this new media play in society? Celebrants saw an opportunity for educational and cultural uplift; critics feared the degradation of the standards of public taste. Some believed acoustic media would fulfill the promise of participatory democracy by better informing the public, while others saw an opportunity for manipulation. The innovations of this period prompted not only a restructuring and consolidation of corporate mass media interests and a shift in the conventions and patterns of media consumption but also a renegotiation of the social functions assigned to mass media forms.
Steve J. Wurtzler’s impeccably researched history adds a new dimension to the study of sound media, proving that the ultimate form technology takes is never predetermined. Rather, it is shaped by conflicting visions of technological possibility in economic, cultural, and political realms. Electric Sounds also illustrates the process through which technologies become media and the ways in which media are integrated into American life.
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2007
Series: Film and Culture Series
ISBN 0231136773, 9780231136778
Length 393 pages
Christian Fuchs: Internet and Society. Social Theory in the Information Age (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · cooperation, facebook, gift economy, information technology, internet, mass media, myspace, neoliberalism, politics, technology, virtual communities, youtube
In this exceptional study, Christian Fuchs discusses how the internet has transformed the lives of human beings and social relationships in contemporary society. By outlining a social theory of the internet and the information society, he demonstrates how the ecological, economic, political, and cultural systems of contemporary society have been transformed by new ICTs. Fuchs highlights how new forms of cooperation and competition are advanced and supported by the internet in subsystems of society and also discusses opportunities and risks of the information society.
Publisher Routledge, 2007
ISBN 0415961327, 9780415961325
Length 398 pages
Myung-Jin Park, James Curran (eds.): De-Westernizing Media Studies (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · apartheid, audience, corporatism, democracy, mass media, media studies, public broadcasting, television
De-Westernizing Media Studies brings together leading media critics from around the world to address central questions in the study of the media. How do the media connect to power in society? Who and what influence the media? How is globalization changing both society and the media?
Series: Communication and society
Publisher Routledge, 2000
ISBN 0415193958, 9780415193955
Length 342 pages
Gholam Khiabany: Iranian Media: The Paradox of Modernity (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · islam, mass media, media policy, modernity, sociology
The post-revolutionary state in Iran has tried to amalgamate “Sharia with electricity” and modernity with what it considers as “Islam”. This process has been anything but smooth and has witnessed intensive forms of political and social contestation. This paper examines key aspects of the contradictions and tensions in the Iranian media market, social stratification and competing forms of “Islamism”/nationalism by looking at the context of production and consumption of the media in Iran. It provides an overview of the expansion of the Iranian communication system. By examining the role of the state in this process and the economic realities of the media in Iran, it challenges the one-dimensional liberal focus on the repressive role of the state and argues against the misguided view that sees a political economy view of the centrality of capital, class and the state to media as irrelevant in the global South. It suggests that the Iranian case also demonstrates a peculiar feature of the Iranian communication industry where liberalization and privatization are the order of the day, but where the state is still reluctant to give up its ideological control over the media. And this is another contradiction (or limit) of an overtly ideological state keen on “development” and “modernization” caught between the web of pragmatism and the imperative of the market, and the straightjacket of “Islamism”.
Publisher Routledge, 2009
ISBN 0415962897, 9780415962896
Length 258 pages
Marshall McLuhan: The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962)
Filed under book | Tags: · global village, literacy, mass media, movable type, print, renaissance, scholasticism, technology, typography, writing
In this book, McLuhan analyzes the effects of mass media, especially the printing press, on European culture and human consciousness. It popularized the term global village, which refers to the idea that mass communication allows a village-like mindset to apply to the entire world; and Gutenberg Galaxy, which we may regard today to refer to the accumulated body of recorded works of human art and knowledge, especially books.
McLuhan studies the emergence of what he calls Gutenberg Man, the subject produced by the change of consciousness wrought by the advent of the printed book. Apropos of his axiom, “The medium is the message,” McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. He also argued that the development of the printing press led to the creation of nationalism, dualism, domination of rationalism, automatisation of scientific research, uniformation and standardisation of culture and alienation of individuals.
Publisher University of Toronto Press, 1962
reprint
ISBN 0802060412, 9780802060419
Length 300 pages
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