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Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture

P. David Marshall

Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, celebrities represent not only the embodiment of success but also the ultimate construction of false value. This book questions the impulse to become ... More

Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, celebrities represent not only the embodiment of success but also the ultimate construction of false value. This book questions the impulse to become embroiled with the construction and collapse of the famous, exploring the concept of the new public intimacy: a product of social media in which celebrities from Lady Gaga to Barack Obama are expected to continuously campaign for audiences in new ways. The text also investigates the viewing public’s desire to associate with celebrity and addresses the explosion of instant access to celebrity culture, bringing famous people and their admirers closer than ever before.Less

Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media

Shannon Mattern

Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Shannon Mattern goes far beyond the historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Her ... More

Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Shannon Mattern goes far beyond the historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Her vivid prose leads readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories and takes media archaeology to the city’s streets, revealing new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories.Less

Dead Matter: The Meaning of Iconic Corpses

Margaret Schwartz

An Iconography of the Flesh theorizes the relationship between the body and the image by looking at the corpse as a special instance of a body that is both thing and representation. Unlike ... More

An Iconography of the Flesh theorizes the relationship between the body and the image by looking at the corpse as a special instance of a body that is both thing and representation. Unlike sociological or anthropological studies of death and funerary practice, this work takes as its starting point the special role of the photograph in modern mourning practices, particularly those surrounding public figures. Arguing that the evolving cultural understanding of photographic realism structures our relationship to the corpse, the book outlines a new politics of representation in which some bodies are more visible (and vulnerable) in death than others. An Iconography of the Flesh ultimately argues that death without a body is specific to the capitalist mode of social reproduction and its attendant alienation of meaningful representations of death in favor of ghostly figures of bare life that reflect the exploitation of those whose bodies are considered expendable.Less

Digital Memory and the Archive

Wolfgang Ernst

Jussi Parikka (ed.)

In Ernst’s media theory, archaeology becomes archivological analysis that refuses to stay on the interface level. Instead, it reveals the technological conditions of our contemporary techniques of ... More

In Ernst’s media theory, archaeology becomes archivological analysis that refuses to stay on the interface level. Instead, it reveals the technological conditions of our contemporary techniques of memory and time. The archivological approach focuses on the infrastructure of media historical knowledge. With an extended concept of the archive, a media archaeological and archivological approach to the past means that media can not be made into “historical” objects of research only. Different media systems, from library catalogues to micro-filming, have influenced the content as well as the understanding of the historical remains of the archive itself. Alphabetic writing which has dominated the archive for centuries has dramatically been challenged by signal recording (photography, the phonograph, cinematography) and puzzled the archivists at the beginning of the age of media reproduction. Now, in the digital age, we are faced with further challenges concerning cultural memory, remembering and forgetting. Time is not registered only through historical writing but also through the microtemporality of the machines themselves. Instead of narrative and historical accounts of media history, Archives, Media and Cultural Memory that we need a more medium-specific account of the interaction of past and current media cultures. Media studies is extended into an analysis of their scientific and technological roots, while combining such specificity with exciting insights into contemporary philosophy and media theory.Less

Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation

Jeff Scheible

Emoticons matter. Equal signs do, too. This book takes them seriously and shows how and why they matter. Digital Shift explores the increasingly ubiquitous presence of punctuation and typographical ... More

Emoticons matter. Equal signs do, too. This book takes them seriously and shows how and why they matter. Digital Shift explores the increasingly ubiquitous presence of punctuation and typographical marks in our lives-using them as reading lenses to consider a broad range of textual objects and practices across the digital age. Jeff Scheible argues that pronounced shifts in textual practices have occurred with the growing overlap of crucial spheres of language and visual culture, that is, as screen technologies have proliferated and come to form the interface of our everyday existence. Specifically, he demonstrates that punctuation and typographical marks have provided us with a rare opportunity to harness these shifts and make sense of our new media environments. He does so through key films and media phenomena of the twenty-first century, from the popular and familiar to the avant-garde and the obscure: the mass profile-picture change on Facebook to equal signs (by 2.7 million users on a single day in 2013, signaling support for gay marriage); the widely viewed hashtag skit in Jimmy Fallon’s Late Night show; Spike Jonze’s Adaptation; Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know; Ryan Trecartin’s Comma Boat; and more. Extending the dialogue about media and culture in the digital age in original directions, Digital Shift is a uniquely cross-disciplinary work that reveals the impact of punctuation on the politics of visual culture and everyday life in the digital age.Less

Does Writing Have a Future?

Vilém Flusser

This book asks what will happen to thought and communication as written communication gives way, inevitably, to digital expression. In the introduction, it proposes that writing does not, in fact, ... More

This book asks what will happen to thought and communication as written communication gives way, inevitably, to digital expression. In the introduction, it proposes that writing does not, in fact, have a future because everything that is now conveyed in writing—and much that cannot be—can be recorded and transmitted by other means. The balance of this book teases out the nuances of these developments. To find a common denominator among texts and practices that span millennia, the book looks back to the earliest forms of writing and forward to the digitization of texts now under way. For this book, writing—despite its limitations when compared to digital media—underpins historical consciousness, the concept of progress, and the nature of critical inquiry. While the text as a cultural form may ultimately become superfluous, it argues, the art of writing will not so much disappear but rather evolve into new kinds of thought and expression.Less

Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance

Curtis Marez

Speculative Technologies is a cultural study of technology in conflicts between California agribusiness and workers of color in California from the 1940s to the 1990s and beyond. An important ... More

Speculative Technologies is a cultural study of technology in conflicts between California agribusiness and workers of color in California from the 1940s to the 1990s and beyond. An important practical and symbolic means of exploiting and disciplining labor, agribusiness technology also became the medium and object of struggle over the future of California agriculture. Farm workers have opposed mechanization in the fields, industrial work camps, and pesticides. They have also turned a critical gaze on agribusiness in numerous graphics, photos, films, and videos, thereby decoupling visual technology from an exclusive connection to patriarchal white capitalism. Farm worker unions inverted the hierarchical relations of looking that structured agribusiness media and promoted new kinds of activist spectatorship among farm workers and their supporters. Finally, farm workers have appropriated visual technologies to imagine better futures. Union cameras and computer screens hence constituted tools for speculative world building that put the farm worker movement in dialogue with futurist thinking and speculative fictions of all sorts. Speculative Technologies presents a cultural history from below, illuminating how working class people of color have often been early adopters and imaginative users of new media technologies. Additionally, the book forwards a completely novel analysis of speculative fiction and its historic engagements with the farm worker movement in ways that illuminate both. Although many studies focus primarily on the United Farm Workers, Speculative Technologies situates the UFW in relationship to longer histories of farm worker futurism and their wide influence across a range of cultural and social contexts. Finally, Speculative Technologies presents a new account of the historical genesis of neoliberalism in struggles between farm workers and corporate agribusiness.Less

The Fourth Eye: M ori Media in Aotearoa New Zealand

Brendan Hokowhitu and Vijay Devadas (eds)

From the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between Indigenous and settler cultures to the emergence of the first-ever state-funded Māori television network, New Zealand has been a hotbed of ... More

From the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between Indigenous and settler cultures to the emergence of the first-ever state-funded Māori television network, New Zealand has been a hotbed of Indigenous concerns. Given its history of colonization, coping with biculturalism is central to New Zealand life. Much of this “bicultural drama” plays out in the media and is molded by an anxiety surrounding the ongoing struggle over citizenship rights that is seated within the politics of recognition. This book brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars to provide a critical and comprehensive account of the intricate and complex relationship between the media and Māori culture. Examining the Indigenous mediascape, it shows how Māori filmmakers, actors, and media producers have depicted conflicts over citizenship rights and negotiated the representation of Indigenous people. From nineteenth-century Māori-language newspapers to contemporary Māori film and television, the contributors explore a variety of media forms including magazine cover stories, print advertisements, commercial images, and current Māori-language newspapers to illustrate the construction, expression, and production of indigeneity through media.Less

From Light to Byte: Toward an Ethics of Digital Cinema

Markos Hadjioannou

Cinema has been undergoing a profound technological shift: celluloid film is being replaced by digital media in the production, distribution, and reception of moving images. Concerned with the debate ... More

Cinema has been undergoing a profound technological shift: celluloid film is being replaced by digital media in the production, distribution, and reception of moving images. Concerned with the debate surrounding digital cinema’s ontology and the interrelationship between cinema cultures, this book investigates the very idea of change as it is expressed in the current technological transition. The text asks what is different in the way digital movies depict the world and engage with the individual and how we might best address the technological shift within media archaeologies. The book turns to the technical basis of the image as its first point of departure, considering the creative and perceptual activities of moviemakers and viewers. Grounded in film history, film theory, and philosophy, it explores how the digital configures its engagement with reality and the individual while simultaneously replaying and destabilizing celluloid’s own structures. It observes that, where film’s photographic foundation encourages an existential association between individual and reality, digital representations are graphic renditions of mathematical codes whose causal relations are more difficult to trace.Less

Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture

Patrick Crogan

From flight simulators and first-person shooters to MMPOG and innovative strategy games like 2008’s Spore, computer games owe their development to computer simulation and imaging produced by and for ... More

From flight simulators and first-person shooters to MMPOG and innovative strategy games like 2008’s Spore, computer games owe their development to computer simulation and imaging produced by and for the military during the Cold War. To understand their place in contemporary culture, this book argues, we must first understand the military logics that created and continue to inform them. The book situates computer games and gaming within the contemporary technocultural moment, connecting them to developments in the conceptualization of pure war since the Second World War and the evolution of simulation as both a technological achievement and a sociopolitical tool. The text begins by locating the origins of computer games in the development of cybernetic weapons systems in the 1940s, the U.S. Air Force’s attempt to use computer simulation to protect the country against nuclear attack, and the U.S. military’s development of the SIMNET simulated battlefield network in the late 1980s. It then examines specific game modes and genres in detail, from the creation of virtual space in fight simulation games and the co-option of narrative forms in gameplay to the continuities between online gaming sociality and real-world communities and the potential of experimental or artgame projects like September 12th: A Toy World and Painstation, to critique conventional computer games.Less

Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture

Adrienne Shaw

New and heated debates abound over how women, people of color, LGBT people, and other marginalized groups are represented in video games. Debate stakeholders almost always assume the homogeneity of ... More

New and heated debates abound over how women, people of color, LGBT people, and other marginalized groups are represented in video games. Debate stakeholders almost always assume the homogeneity of the video games industry and its audience. Most research on the current debates starts from the assumption that representation matters. In contrast, Playing at the Edge directly interrogates how and why the representation of marginalized groups matters in games. By starting with members of marginalized groups who play games (particularly LGBT players), this book offers an audience-centered analysis of the politics of representation. Playing at the Edge builds upon feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity and draws upon ethnographic audience research methods in order to make sense of how representation comes to matter. It argues that video game players experience race, gender, and sexuality together, and as such they must be analyzed together by scholars and addressed together by game producers. By unpacking how representation comes to matter to audiences, Playing at the Edge offers a new understanding of the stakes in politics of representation debates. It offers a framework for talking about representation, difference, and diversity in an era in which user-generated content, individualized media consumption, and blurring of producer/consumer roles has lessened the utility of traditional models of media representation analysis. It asks: what new things can we learn about media consumption when we start at the edges?Less

A Geology of Media

Jussi Parikka

Media history is millions, even billions, of years old. That is the premise of this pioneering and provocative book, which argues that to adequately understand contemporary media culture we must set ... More

Media history is millions, even billions, of years old. That is the premise of this pioneering and provocative book, which argues that to adequately understand contemporary media culture we must set out from material realities that precede media themselves—Earth’s history, geological formations, minerals, and energy. And to do so, writes Jussi Parikka, is to confront the profound environmental and social implications of this ubiquitous, but hardly ephemeral, realm of modern life. Exploring the resource depletion and material resourcing required for us to use our devices to live networked lives, Parikka grounds his analysis in Siegfried Zielinski’s widely discussed notion of deep time—but takes it back millennia. Not only are rare earth minerals and many other materials needed to make our digital media machines work, he observes, but used and obsolete media technologies return to the earth as residue of digital culture, contributing to growing layers of toxic waste for future archaeologists to ponder. Parikka shows that these materials must be considered alongside the often dangerous and exploitative labor processes that refine them into the devices underlying our seemingly virtual or immaterial practices. A Geology of Media demonstrates that the environment does not just surround our media cultural world—it runs through it, enables it, and hosts it in an era of unprecedented climate change. While looking backward to Earth’s distant past, it also looks forward to a more expansive media theory—and, implicitly, media activism.Less

George Cukor: A Double Life

Patrick McGilligan

One of the highest-paid studio contract directors of his time, George Cukor was nominated five times for an Academy Award as Best Director. In publicity and mystique he was dubbed the “women’s ... More

One of the highest-paid studio contract directors of his time, George Cukor was nominated five times for an Academy Award as Best Director. In publicity and mystique he was dubbed the “women’s director” for guiding the most sensitive leading ladies to immortal performances, including Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Judy Garland, and—in ten films, among them The Philadelphia Story and Adam’s Rib—his lifelong friend and collaborator Katharine Hepburn. But behind the “women’s director” label lurked the open secret that set Cukor apart from a generally macho fraternity of directors: he was a homosexual, a rarity among the top echelon. This biography reveals how Cukor persevered within a system fraught with bigotry while becoming one of Hollywood’s consummate filmmakers.Less

How to Do Things With Videogames

Ian Bogost

In recent years, computer games have moved from the margins of popular culture to its center. Reviews of new games and profiles of game designers now regularly appear in the New York Times and the ... More

In recent years, computer games have moved from the margins of popular culture to its center. Reviews of new games and profiles of game designers now regularly appear in the New York Times and the New Yorker, and sales figures for games are reported alongside those of books, music, and movies. They are increasingly used for purposes other than entertainment, yet debates about videogames still fork along one of two paths: accusations of debasement through violence and isolation or defensive paeans to their potential as serious cultural works. This book contends that such generalizations obscure the limitless possibilities offered by the medium’s ability to create complex simulated realities. This book explores the many ways computer games are used today: documenting important historical and cultural events; educating both children and adults; promoting commercial products; and serving as platforms for art, pornography, exercise, relaxation, pranks, and politics. Examining these applications in a series of short chapters, the book argues that together they make the medium broader, richer, and more relevant to a wider audience.Less

How To Talk About Videogames

Ian Bogost

More than half a century later, it’s still not clear what place videogames have in culture. Some would celebrate them as heir apparent to cinema’s throne, the art-form of the twenty-first century. ... More

More than half a century later, it’s still not clear what place videogames have in culture. Some would celebrate them as heir apparent to cinema’s throne, the art-form of the twenty-first century. But this seems unlikely, and not just because games remain a niche interest despite the fact that so many people play them, but also because the twenty-first century is an era of media fragmentation, of tweets and Instagrams and animated GIFs and memes, but one still built around traditional media forms: text, image, and moving image. Maybe it’s because games are as much like appliances—toasters or rice cookers, say—as they are like art and media. We operate games, we use them like we use soaps and rice cookers. But yet, also use them like we use cinema and literature. It’s time to embrace both halves of games, the art and the appliance, by treating each game as the weird, unholy confluence of culture and apparatus that it really is.Less

I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

Mark Dery

Exploring the darkest corners of the national psyche and the nethermost regions of the self—the gothic, the grotesque, and the carnivalesque—this book aims to make sense of the cultural dynamics of ... More

Exploring the darkest corners of the national psyche and the nethermost regions of the self—the gothic, the grotesque, and the carnivalesque—this book aims to make sense of the cultural dynamics of the American madhouse early in the twenty-first century. The book includes chapters on the pornographic fantasies of Star Trek fans, Facebook as Limbo of the Lost, George W. Bush’s fear of his inner queer, the theme-parking of the Holocaust, the homoerotic subtext of the Super Bowl, the hidden agendas of IQ tests, Santa’s secret kinship with Satan, the sadism of dentists, Adolf Hitler’s afterlife on YouTube, the sexual identity of 2001’s HAL, the suicide note considered as a literary genre, the surrealist poetry of robot spam, the zombie apocalypse, Lady Gaga, the Church of Euthanasia, toy guns in the dream lives of American boys, and the polymorphous perversity of Madonna’s big toe. The book casts a critical eye on the accepted order of things, boldly crossing into the intellectual no-fly zones demarcated by cultural warriors on both sides of America’s ideological divide: controversy-phobic corporate media, blinkered academic elites, and middlebrow tastemakers.Less

Into the Universe of Technical Images

Vilém Flusser

Poised between hope and despair for a humanity facing an urgent communications crisis, this book forecasts either the first truly human, infinitely creative society in history or a society of ... More

Poised between hope and despair for a humanity facing an urgent communications crisis, this book forecasts either the first truly human, infinitely creative society in history or a society of unbearable, oppressive sameness, locked in a pattern it cannot change. First published in German in 1985, this book outlines the history of communications technology as a process of increasing abstraction. The book charts how communication evolved from direct interaction with the world to mediation through various technologies. The invention of writing marked one significant shift; the invention of photography marked another, heralding the current age of the technical image. The automation of the processing of technical images carries both promise and threat: the promise of freeing humans to play and invent and the threat for networks of automation to proceed independently of humans.Less

Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture

Peter Krapp

In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, this book identifies creative reservoirs of computer-mediated interaction. Throughout new ... More

In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, this book identifies creative reservoirs of computer-mediated interaction. Throughout new media cultures, it traces a resistance to the heritage of motion studies, ergonomics, and efficiency; in doing so, it shows how creativity is stirred within the networks of digital culture. This book offers a fresh look at hypertext and tactical media, tunes into laptop music, and situates the emergent forms of computer gaming and machinima in media history. The text analyzes text, image, sound, virtual spaces, and gestures in noisy channels of computer-mediated communication that seek to embrace—rather than overcome—the limitations and misfires of computing.Less

On the Existence of Digital Objects

Yuk Hui

This book is a philosophical investigation into digital objects; mere data in their simplest form, digital objects are in many cases further formalized through structural metadata schemes or ... More

This book is a philosophical investigation into digital objects; mere data in their simplest form, digital objects are in many cases further formalized through structural metadata schemes or ontologies. As data and metadata, these formalized objects present themselves as programmable objects which we can create, drag, delete; as well as reticulations which are created through logical inferences. How possible it is to think about individualisation and individuation of a digital object? This book systematically constructs a theory of relations based on a dialogue between Martin Heidegger and Gilbert Simondon. One one hand, we can investigate the individualisation of digital objects through the study of the history of ontology and mark-up languages GML, SGML, HTML, XML and web ontologies; and the individuation through an investigation of the existential structure of digital objects within their systems and milieux. With such a relational approach towards digital objects and technical systems, this book continues to take up the question of alienation proposed by Simondon, which according to him comes out of the lack of understanding of technics and subsequently opposes it to culture. Consequently, what kind of possibility is there for us in this technical system of digital objects after individuation and individualisation; to what extent can relational thinking help us to reflect on this question? The book reflects on the common vision on the convergence of culture and technics present in the thoughts of Simondon and Heidegger, with a phenomenological motif “back to the digital objects themselves”.Less

Our Gang: A Racial History of The Little Rascals

Julia Lee

The series Our Gang (also known as The Little Rascals) has been called the most popular juvenile series ever filmed, beloved by generations of children and adults. According to Hollywoodlegend, ... More

The series Our Gang (also known as The Little Rascals) has been called the most popular juvenile series ever filmed, beloved by generations of children and adults. According to Hollywoodlegend, creator Hal Roach saw a group of children playing in a lumberyard and, charmed by their antics, conceived of a series based on kids “being kids.” From the beginning, however, Our Gang was an anomaly. At a time of Jim Crow and a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, Our Gang featured black children playing alongside white children, attending school with them, and getting into mischief with them. This bookis the untold story of race and Our Gang. It is the story of unconventional men like Hal Roach and his gag writers, who tapped into powerful American myths about race and childhood to present an unusual fantasy of interracial friendship. It is the story of the four black stars of the series--Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison, Allen“Farina” Hoskins, Matthew“Stymie” Beard, and Billie “Buckwheat” Thomas—the gang within the Gang, whose personal histories have become lost with the passage of time and the shifting political landscape. And it is the story of America itself, the messy, multiracial nation that found in Our Gang its comic avatar, a slapstick version of democracy, itself.Less