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Contemporary life is increasingly shaped through attunement to the atmospheric affordances of the media environment. Ambient Media delves into the use of music, video, film, and literature as tools to tune this atmospheric self. The book traces the emergence of mood-regulating media in Japan from the environmental art and Erik Satie boom of the 1960s and 70s to the more recent emphasis on “healing” styles. Focusing on how ambience reshapes those dwelling within it, Ambient Media explores the working of atmospheres designed for affective calm, rhythmic attunement, embodied security, and urban coexistence. The book argues for understanding ambient media as a specifically neoliberal response to mood regulation, serving as a way to atmospherically shape collective behavior while providing resources for emotional autonomy and attention restoration at the individual level. Ambient Media considers the adaptive side of atmosphere as an approach to self-care and social mobility. At the same time, the book considers the limits of mood regulation and the low-affect lifestyle when it comes to interpersonal life. Musicians, video artists, filmmakers, and writers in Japan have expanded on Brian Eno’s original idea of a style affording “calm, and a space to think,” providing materials to cultivate sensory serenity within the uncertain horizons of the contemporary social landscape. Offering a new way of understanding Japanese social demands to “read the air,” the book documents both the adaptive and the alarming sides of this turn to mediated moods.

As exemplary representatives of a form of critical feminism, Judith Butler, Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway offer entry into the great crises of contemporary society, politics, and culture through their writings. Butler leads readers to rethink the boundaries of the human in a time of perpetual war. Hayles turns herself into a “writing machine” in order to find a dwelling place for the digital humanities within the austere landscape of the culture of the code. Haraway is the one contemporary thinker to have begun the necessary ethical project of creating a new language of potential reconciliation among previously warring species. This book states that the postmodernism of Judith Butler, the posthumanism of Katherine Hayles, and the companionism of Donna Haraway are possible pathways to the posthuman future that is captured by the specter of body drift. Body drift refers to the fact that individuals no longer inhabit a body in any meaningful sense of the term, but rather occupy a multiplicity of bodies: gendered, sexualized, laboring, disciplined, imagined, and technologically augmented. Body drift is constituted by the blast of information culture envisioned by artists, communicated by social networking, and signified by its signs. It is lived daily by remixing, resplicing, and redesigning the codes: codes of gender, sexuality, class, ideology, and identity. The writings of Butler, Hayles, and Haraway, this text reveals, provide the critical vocabulary and political context for understanding the deep complexities of body drift and challenging the current emphasis on the material body.

Coin-Operated Americans centers on the reframing of boyhood that took place in the popular discourse surrounding early video gaming, but it is not another story about young men. Rather, it charts Americans’ efforts to make sense of video gaming as an emergent medium through news coverage, films, television programs, and other media. The book explains how video gaming both challenged and reinforced existing ideals of masculinity, and how efforts by industry advocates and cultural critics alike to make sense of gaming helped shape and restrict gamer identity. Using diverse archival sources alongside popular films and television programs and a series of original oral history interviews, Coin-Operated Americans offers insight into the construction of gaming in popular imagination. Early coin-operated video games like PONG (Atari, 1972) emerged from the same industry that popularized pool and foosball tables and pinball machines in bars and bowling alleys. As this book details, the transition by which video gaming became strongly associated with boyhood was heavily influenced both by the coin-op industry’s efforts to establish respectability and by existing cultural narratives surrounding technology, masculinity, and youth.

Human Programming is a cultural history of the idea of the programmable mind in U.S. culture. It argues that literary, cinematic, and rhetorical figurations of the programmed mind have shaped conversations in U.S. political and scientific culture about freedom and unfreedom, and about democracy and its enemies from World War II to the War on Terror. Beginning in the early twentieth century, developments in media technology, cybernetics, behaviorist psychology, and sociology made it possible to imagine the malleability of human behavior, or automatism, on a mass scale. Propagandists, scientists, and creative producers alike adapted visions of human programmability in order to imagine the psychological conditions of non-democratic unfreedom, often in the service of representing its opposite, a supposedly exceptional American freedom. As explicitly racist and eugenics-based propaganda fell out of favor after World War II, the enemies of the U.S. were increasingly represented and understood through the figuration of mental unfreedom. Human Programming charts this shift by examining the figure of the “human automaton”: the will-less, automatic, and therefore subhuman figure whose uncanny and sometimes comedic effects drive narratives about human programmability. Rather than attributing either a universal philosophical meaning to automaton narratives or ascribing to them a single symptomatic interpretation, as other readers of this literary figure have done, the book traces how the human automaton developed through a network of exchanges between different forms of discourse in popular culture, the public sphere, and scientific writing.

In Necromedia, media activist Marcel O’Gorman takes aim at “the collusion of death and technology,” drawing on a broad arsenal that ranges from posthumanist philosophy and social psychology to digital art and handmade “objects-to-think-with.” O’Gorman mixes philosophical speculation with artistic creation, personal memoir, and existential dread. He is not so much arguing against technoculture as documenting a struggle to embrace the technical essence of human being without permitting technology worshippers to have the last word on what it means to be human. Inspired in part by the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, O’Gorman begins by suggesting that technology provides humans with a cultural hero system built on the denial of death and a false promise of immortality. This theory adds an existential zest to the book, allowing the author to devise a creative diagnosis of what Bernard Stiegler has called the malaise of contemporary technoculture and also to contribute a potential therapy—one that requires embracing human finitude, infusing care into the process of technological production, and recognizing the vulnerability of all things, human and nonhuman. With this goal in mind, Necromedia prescribes new research practices in the humanities that involve both written work and the creation of objects-to-think-with that are designed to infiltrate and shape the technoculture that surrounds us.

Sensors are increasingly present in our environments and technologies. At the same time, environmental sensing is a set of practices meant to provide more information on environmental change, while enabling new forms of environmental citizenship. Program Earth documents and discusses the ways in which new environments and citizen-sensing practices are emerging along with environmental sensing technologies. Through discussing specific instances where sensors are deployed for environmental study and citizen engagement across three areas of environmental sensing, from wild sensing to pollution sensing and urban sensing, Program Earth asks how sensor technologies are generating distinct ways of programming environments and environmental relations. What are the implications for wiring up environments in these ways? How do sensor applications not only program environments, but also program the sorts of citizens and collectives we might become? Working across digital media theory, science and technology studies, and environmental studies, Program Earth takes up these questions to examine the distinct environments, exchanges, and entities that take hold through these sensorized projects. This study develops the concept of the becoming environmental of computation in order to map the ways in which sensors are used to understand ecological processes, to track the migration of animals, to monitor pollutants, to facilitate urban participation, and to program infrastructure. Through these examples, Program Earth suggests that the programming of Earth yields processes for making new environments not necessarily as an extension of humans, but rather as new “techno-geographies” that emerge across technologies, people, practices, and more-than-human entities.

Since the mid-2000s, an increasing number of video games have been designed for women audiences. The market is tenuous, and has grown in spurts, but has resulted in a reality where roughly half of all video game players are now women. What once was considered a masculine domain is currently embedded in a stylistic and economic shift. With this in mind, Ready Player Two: Women, Video Games, and Designed Identity is an analysis of video games designed and advertised for women audiences, with the goal of better understanding what is really “at play” in these games. Games in this category range in style: from Diner Dash to Mystery Case Files and from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood to the Nintendo Wii, even distinctly different games have commonalities. Using the premise of “Designed Identity” or “a hybrid outcome of industry conventions, textual constructs, and audience placements in the design and structure of video games” the book introduces the premise of Player Two. Player Two is not a real player, but a ghost of a player, imagined by the video game industry. While feminine, Player Two also comes packaged with other identity markers: she is white, middle class, heterosexual, cis-gendered, and abled. Breaking down how Player Two is constructed in the games created for her, Ready Player Two considers both the positive and negative aspects of this fictionalized, yet transformational character in the video game industry.