Read Me! ASCII Culture & The Revenge of Knowledge. Filtered by Nettime (1999)

A compilation of writings and debates from the Nettime newsgroup and internet mailing list. This book documents the debates over emerging media technologies that are currently reshaping society. What are the liberatory potentials? Where are the points of political conflict and class struggle in this new culture? What are the pitfalls of new technology? Read Me! provides the beginnings of this discussion and an outline for what has become a continuing forum on the Net.

Edited by Josephine Bosma, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Ted Byfield, Matthew Fuller, Geert Lovink, Diana McCarty, Pit Schultz Felix Stalder, McKenzie Wark, and Faith Wilding
Publisher: Autonomedia (February, 1999)
ISBN: 1570270899, 978-1570270895
556 pages

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Fibreculture Journal 1-15 (2003-2009)

Fibreculture Journal is a peer reviewed international journal that explores the issues and ideas of concern and interest to both the Fibreculture network and wider social formations. The journal encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information and communication technologies and their policy frameworks, network cultures and their informational logic, new media forms and their deployment, and the possibilities of socio-technical invention and sustainability. Other broad topics of interest include the cultural contexts, philosophy and politics of information and creative industries; national and international strategies for innovation, research and development; education; media and culture, and new media arts.

What Now? : The Imprecise and Disagreeable Aesthetics of Remix
Fibreculture 15, 2009
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Web 2.0: Before, During and After the Event
Fibreculture 14, 2009
Edited by Darren Tofts and Christian McCrea
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After Convergence: What Connects?
Fibreculture 13, 2008
Edited by Caroline Bassett, Maren Hartmann, Kate O’Riordan
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Models, Metamodels and Contemporary Media
Fibreculture 12, 2008
Edited by Gary Genosko and Andrew Murphie
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The Futures of Digital Media Arts and Culture
Fibreculture 11, 2008
Edited by Andrew Hutchison and Ingrid Richardson
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New Media, Networks and New Pedagogies
Fibreculture 10, 2007
Edited by Adrian Miles
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General Issue
Fibreculture 9, 2006
Edited by Andrew Murphie
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Gaming Networks
Fibreculture 8, 2006
Edited by Chris Chesher, Alice Crawford and Julian Kücklich
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Distributed Aesthetics
Fibreculture 7, 2005
Edited by Lisa Gye, Anna Munster and Ingrid Richardson
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Mobility, New Social Intensities, and the Coordinates of Digital Networks
Fibreculture 6, 2005
Edited by Andrew Murphie, Larissa Hjorth, Gillian Fuller and Sandra Buckley
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Multitudes, Creative Organisation and the Precarious Condition of New Media Labour
Fibreculture 5, 2005
Edited by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter
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Contagion and the Diseases of Information
Fibreculture 4, 2005
Edited by Andrew Goffey
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General Issue
Fibreculture 3, 2004
Edited by Andrew Murphie
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New Media, New Worlds?
Fibreculture 2, 2003
Edited by Andrew Murphie
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The Politics of Networks
Fibreculture 1, 2003
Edited by Andrew Murphie
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Fibreculture Journal: Internet theory + criticism + research
Publisher: Fibreculture Publications/Open Humanities Press, Australia
ISSN: 1449 – 1443

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Janet Staiger, Sabine Hake (eds.): Convergence Media History (2009)

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

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Dennis Redmond: The World is Watching. Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 1968-1995 (2004)

Evolving rapidly from the movie screen to the television screen to the computer screen, video culture has blossomed from its origins as an obscure spin-off of the 1960s Anglo-American media culture into one of the leading art forms of the late twentieth century. And as such, video culture has grown from being the dominion of small but dedicated cult followings to becoming a near mainstream cinematic interest. The World Is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 1968–1995 explores the origins and implications of this powerful visual medium which crosses national, cultural, and political boundaries to present provocative tales of the highest quality. Dennis Redmond’s probing study is rooted in close readings of three stylish and highly successful video efforts—The Prisoner (1967), The Decalogue (1988), and Neon Genesis: Evangelion (1995).

Irish director and star Patrick McGoohan’s classic science fiction vision, The Prisoner, established many of the basic conventions of video for such elements as shot selection, set design, scripting, scoring, and editing techniques. In The Prisoner, a government agent has resigned his position only to be immediately abducted and confined to an isolated town. Thus imprisoned, the agent faces the sinister and surreal efforts of his captors to break him and learn the secret cause of his resignation. Saturated with Cold War allegory, this seventeen-part series was groundbreaking in its exploration of new types of global content, ranging from gender and ethnic identity to the politics of information. Part futuristic thriller, part James Bond parody, the cult series remains hugely popular among partisans of science fiction, and has had an indelible influence on its mainstream descendants.

Set in a Polish housing complex, each episode of The Decalogue examines one of the ten commandments. The provocative series synthesized elements of the Eastern European auteur film with the consumerism of its Western European counterparts, establishing the new genre of Eurovideo. Paying special attention to director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s micropolitics of gender, as well as his innovations in scripting, lighting, and framing, Redmond locates The Decalogue within the broader context of Polish filmmaking and as a harbinger of the subsequent Velvet Revolutions of Eastern Europe. Now available on DVD for English-speaking audiences, The Decalogue remains a stunning specimen of video artistry.

Aided by transcripts that are far superior to the flawed English dubbing in some video versions, Redmond’s analysis of Hideaki Anno’s acclaimed television series Neon Genesis: Evangelion explores the increasingly popular narrative form of anime. This animated series is set in the post-apocalyptic future, where young pilots in robotic battle suits combat alien invaders. In discussing this twenty-six part epic undertaking, Redmond identifies the impact of the Godzilla narratives, videogame culture, the Japanese mecha, the Hong Kong action thriller and the American sci-fi blockbuster on the formation of a uniquely East Asian identity and aesthetic sensibility. Anime is proving itself to be exceedingly apt and able at crossing national borders and is now enjoying mass popularity among global audiences, thus making it an ideal subject for Redmond’s telling assessment of the impact of video culture worldwide.

Publisher SIU Press, 2004
ISBN 0809325357, 9780809325351
Length 202 pages

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Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, Brian Larkin (eds.): Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (2002)

This groundbreaking volume showcases the exciting work emerging from the ethnography of media, a burgeoning new area in anthropology that expands both social theory and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the way media–film, television, video–are used in societies around the globe, often in places that have been off the map of conventional media studies. The contributors, key figures in this new field, cover topics ranging from indigenous media projects around the world to the unexpected effects of state control of media to the local impact of film and television as they travel transnationally. Their essays, mostly new work produced for this volume, bring provocative new theoretical perspectives grounded in cross-cultural ethnographic realities to the study of media.

Publisher University of California Press, 2002
ISBN 0520224485, 9780520224483
Length 413 pages

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Chris Newbold, Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Hilde van den Bulck (eds.): The Media Book (2002)

The Media Book provides today’s students with a comprehensive foundation for the study of the modern media. It has been systematically compiled to map the field in a way which corresponds to the curricular organization of the field around the globe, providing a complete resource for students in their third year to graduate level courses in the U.S.

Publisher A Hodder Arnold Publication, 2002
ISBN: 0340740485, 978-0340740484
Length 464 pages

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Nick Stevenson: Understanding Media Cultures. Social Theory and Mass Communication (2002)

The Second Edition of this book provides a comprehensive overview of the ways in which social theory has attempted to theorize the importance of the media in contemporary society. Understanding Media Cultures is now fully revised and takes account of the recent theoretical developments associated with New Media and Information Society, as well as the audience and the public sphere.

Keywords and phrases
Baudrillard, cyberfeminism, semiotic, mass media, media imperialism, Frankfurt school, audience theory, democratic realism, Raymond Williams, critical theory, postmodern, post-structuralism, mass communication, technological determinism, hegemonic, Stuart Hall, public sphere, feminism, globalisation

Edition 2, revised
Publisher SAGE, 2002
ISBN 076197363X, 9780761973638
Length 255 pages

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Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964/1994)

With a new introduction by Lewis H. Lapham.

This reissue of Understanding Media marks the thirtieth anniversary (1964-1994) of Marshall McLuhan’s classic expose on the state of the then emerging phenomenon of mass media. Terms and phrases such as “the global village” and “the medium is the message” are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan’s theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.

There has been a notable resurgence of interest in McLuhan’s work in the last few years, fueled by the recent and continuing conjunctions between the cable companies and the regional phone companies, the appearance of magazines such as WiRed, and the development of new media models and information ecologies, many of which were spawned from MIT’s Media Lab. In effect, media now begs to be redefined. In a new introduction to this edition of Understanding Media, Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham reevaluates McLuhan’s work in the light of the technological as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in the last part of this century.

Keywords and phrases
central nervous system, typography, phonograph, Jack Paar, James Joyce, Western world, Lewis Mumford, MAD magazine, movable types, jazz, Elias Canetti, Al Capp, typewriter, Hans Selye, implosion, commodity money, cubism, Finnegans Wake, TV image, Renaissance

Publisher: The MIT Press, 1994
ISBN-10: 0262631598
ISBN-13: 978-0262631594
392 pages

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Nick Couldry, Anna McCarthy (eds.): MediaSpace. Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age (2004)

MediaSpace explores the importance of ideas of space and place to understanding the ways in which we experience the media in our everyday lives. Essays from leading international scholars address the kinds of space created by media and the effects that spatial arrangements have on media forms. Case studies focus on a wide variety of subjects and locales, from in-flight entertainment to mobile media such as personal stereos and mobile phones, and from the electronic spaces of the Internet to the shopping mall.

MediaSpace contains both theoretical overviews and a geographically diverse selection of current research. Of primary interest within media and cultural studies, it will also prove necessary reading for geographers, sociologists and anthropologists concerned with issues of space and media.

Publisher Routledge, 2004
ISBN 0415291755, 9780415291750
Length 303 pages

Keywords and phrases
Latino, Solna Centrum, DotComGuy, smart house, webcam, mobile phone, gentrification, Silicon Alley, personal stereo, Segway Human Transporter, Jennicam, East Harlem, NATPE, e-waste, la Vega, FreedomCAR, Casablanca, Guiyu, machine translation, shopping mall

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Todd Joseph Miles Holden, Timothy J. Scrase (eds.): Medi@sia: Global Media/tion in and Out of Context (2006)

“Medi@sia” is a path-breaking, cross-disciplinary study that employs ethnographic methods and sociological and cultural perspectives to examine the uses and influences of various media in a large number of contexts inside and flowing out of Asia today. The book introduces the concept of the media/tion equation where the compound of information technology (media) and its content (communication) are touched by and associated with the economics, politics, social organization, cultural practices, and moralities in the everyday lives of users. The role of context – the complex spaces influenced by and within which media/tion transpires – is captured in eleven key studies of TV, film, music videos, popular song, romance novels, Internet bulletin boards. comics, brand characters, and advertising. Beyond the contexts of contemporary Asia – many of which have been neglected by conventional media and cultural studies – are the spaces in the world touched by the sweep of Asian-originated media flows. Throughthis perspective, medi@sia proffers a newer, antithetical ‘map’ of globality; one which moves decidedly east to west. Contributing to discourse in a large number of scholarly areas including globalization theory, media sociology, the anthropology of media, cultural studies, communication studies, and Asian studies, medi@sia charts a new interdisciplinary area of inquiry within the current literature and, as such, establishes a precedent for future research.

Publisher Routledge, 2006
ISBN 0415371554, 9780415371551
Length 250 pages

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Paul Levinson: Digital McLuhan. A Guide to the Information Millennium (1999)

Marshall McLuhan died on the last day of 1980, on the doorstep of the personal computer revolution. Yet McLuhan’s ideas, developed in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, presaged a world of media in motion, and its impact on our lives on the dawn of the new millennium. McLuhan’s phrase, “the medium is the message” is his best known and most misunderstood concept. Paul Levinson presents the accuracy of McLuhan’s thinking unavailable while he was alive, and shows him as a man struggling to communicate in an electronic pattern via the straightjacket of paper. Levinson also examines why McLuhan’s theories about media are more important to us today than when they were first written, and why the Wired generation is now turning to McLuhan’s work to understand the global village in the digital age. By exploring the technological influence in industries from publishing to politics, entertainment to business, McLuhan opened the doors for understanding the human relationship with technology. Levinson’s own exploration of McLuhan’s significance in the new electronic generation clarifies the prophetic insights, principles and constructs in McLuhan’s work.

Publisher Routledge, 1999
ISBN 041519251X, 9780415192514
Length 226 pages

Keywords and phrases
personal computer, theremin, rear-view mirror, Marshall McLuhan, tetrad, Connected Education, Neil Postman, RealAudio, mass media, CP/M, Communications Decency Act, global village, Media Ecology, Internet, Gutenberg Galaxy, Paul Levinson, voyeurs, Eric McLuhan, Kaypro, RealVideo

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Alan Bryamn, Cheryl Haslam (eds.): Social Scientists Meet the Media (1994)

This volume examines the troubled relationship between social scientists and the media and does so from the perspectives of both parties. Given their different priorities, it is not surprising that problems arise when social scientists work with the media in the process of research dissemination.

The book is comprised of the personal accounts of social scientists who have had extensive contact with the media–their experiences range from good to bad to disastrous. The academics who contributed to this volume have conducted research on a wide range of topics including education, stress, football hooliganism, intelligence, risk factors for illness, drug use, performance appraisal in universities, politics, sex, religion, terrorism, youth culture and media studies.

Also included are chapters from three well-known media practitioners in which they express their views of how social scientific research is portrayed in the media. The contributors offer practical suggestions for social scientists who want to work more effectively with the media and thereby reach a wider audience.

Contributors include Robert Burgess, Cary L. Cooper, Eric Dunning, Hans J. Eysenck, Helen Haste, Dennis Howitt, Graham Murdock, Jane Ussher, Paul Wilkinson, Peter Evans, Martin Freeth and Oliver Gillie.

Publisher Routledge, 1994
ISBN 0415081912, 9780415081917
Length 227 pages

Keywords and phrases
social scientists, football hooliganism, pornography, Cary Cooper, Eric Dunning, Hans Eysenck, sociology, Alan Bryman, British Psychological Society, journalists, social sciences, mass media, Cyril Burt, psychology, Colin Blakemore, However, Dawn Primarolo, Kate Adie, Robert Burgess, Norbert Elias

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Douglas Kellner: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Post-modern (1995)

Media Culture develops methods and analyses of contemporary film, television, music and other artifacts to discern their nature and effects, argueing that media culture is the dominant form of culture which socializes us and provides materials for identity, social reproduction and change. Through studies of Reagan and Rambo, horror films and youth films, rap music and African American culture, Madonna, fashion, television news and entertainment, MTV, Beavis and Butt-Head, the Gulf-War as cultural text, cyberpunk fiction and postmodern theory, Kellner provides a series of lively studies that both illuminate contemporary culture and provide methods of analysis and critique.

Many people today talk about cultural studies, but Kellner actually does it, carrying through a unique mixture of theoretical analyses and concrete discussions of some of the most popular and influential forms of contemporary media culture. Criticizing social context, political struggle, and the system of cultural production, Kellner develops a multi-dimensional approach to cultural studies that broadens the field and opens it to a variety of disiplines. He also provides approaches to the vexed question of the effects of culture and provides perspectives for cultural studies.

Publisher Routledge, 1995
ISBN 0415105706, 9780415105705
Length 357 pages

Keywords and phrases
Beavis and Butt-Head, cyberpunk, Madonna, cultural studies, Rambo, Frankfurt School, Neuromancer, Top Gun, Miami Vice, Malcolm X, rap music, Spike Lee, Marxism, horror films, Ice-T, feminism, masculist, media culture, multiperspectival, Poltergeist films

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Douglas Rushkoff: Media virus!: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture (1996)

Bold, daring, and provocative, Media Virus! examines the intricate ways in which popular media both manipulate and are manipulated by those who know how to tap into their power. Douglas Rushkoff shows that where there’s a wavelength, there’s a way to “infect” those on it – from the subtly, but intentionally, subversive signals broadcast by shows like “The Simpsons,” to the O.J. media frenzy surrounding the Nicole Brown Simpson murder case, chase, and trial. What does it all mean? Unless you’ve been living in a cave that isn’t cable-ready, you’re already infected with the media virus. But don’t worry, it won’t make you sick. It will make you think.

Publisher Ballantine Books, 1996
ISBN 0345397746, 9780345397744
Length 344 pages

Keywords and phrases
memes, meta-media, Ren & Stimpy, counterculture, smart drugs, Beavis and Butt-head, Negativland, L.A. Law, zines, Futureculture, Swamp Thing, Rodney King, Amy Fisher, Genesis P-Orridge, cyberpunk, Ice-T, flyposters, R. U. Sirius, Willie Horton, NYPD Blue

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Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Brendan Dooley (eds.): The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (2001)

The invention and spread of newspapers in the seventeenth century had a profound effect on early modern European culture and politics. The European pattern for the delivery and consumption of political information provided the model for the rest of the world. However, the transition to printed news was neither rapid nor easy and a greater circulation of news had widely varying effects.
Recent research has revealed much about the origins and development of news publishing in each of its European settings. This book is the first to bring this research together in comprehensive survey. The international contributors to this volume study all of the most important information markets in Europe. Topics covered include:
* the relation between printed and manuscript news
* role of censorship mechanisms
* effects of politics on reading and publishing
* effects of reading on contemporary politics
What emerges from this research is a new view of political information as an enterprise, and of the products of information as commodities circulating far and wide.

Publisher Routledge, 2001
ISBN 0415203104, 9780415203104
Length 310 pages

Keywords and phrases
corantos, Antwerp, Restoration Newspaper, Pory, Copenhagen, Venice, Marchamont Nedham, Spain, Dutch Republic, Habsburg, seventeenth century, Privy Council, Hamburg, Courante uyt Italien, England, newsbooks, censorship, Mercurius, Ben Jonson, France

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