Metamorphoses of (New) Media


Book Description

The current success story of new media and the ongoing digitalisation of our world provide an illuminating starting point for the discussion of the powerful revolutions in our media and media uses initiated by the introduction of a(ny) ‘new’ medium: how do new media evolve and how do they relate to established, ‘old’ media and media uses? What does the rise of new media and media uses imply for other discourses? And not least: which methodological and theoretical approaches help us to understand these developments? Metamorphoses of (New) Media offers an international and interdisciplinary range of studies on these questions. In examining the effects of new media and media uses in fields such as social discourse, transmediality, and aesthetics, the essays in this collection engage with a great variety of examples, from political debate on Twitter to digital storytelling and the game-like experience of DVDs. What these diverse perspectives share, however, is an approach to Metamorphoses of (New) Media as an ongoing, recursive process of change that initiates dialogue and casts light on existing discursive, medial, and aesthetic models.




Media Life


Book Description

Research consistently shows how through the years more of our time gets spent using media, how multitasking our media has become a regular feature of everyday life, and that consuming media for most people increasingly takes place alongside producing media. Media Life is a primer on how we may think of our lives as lived in rather than with media. The book uses the way media function today as a prism to understand key issues in contemporary society, where reality is open source, identities are - like websites - always under construction, and where private life is lived in public forever more. Ultimately, media are to us as water is to fish. The question is: how can we live a good life in media like fish in water? Media Life offers a compass for the way ahead.




Media Representation and the Global Imagination


Book Description

This book is a clear, systematic, original and lively account of how media representations shape the way we see our and others’ lives in a global age. It provides in-depth analysis of a range of international media representations of disaster, war, conflict, migration and celebration. The book explores how images, stories and voices, on television, the Internet, and in advertisements and newspapers, invite us to relocate to distant contexts, and to relate to people who are remote from our daily lives, by developing ‘mediated intimacy’ and focusing on the self. It also explores how these representations shape our self-narratives. Orgad examines five sites of media representation – the other, the nation, possible lives, the world and the self. She argues that representations can and should contribute to fostering more ambivalence and complexity in how we think and feel about the world, our place in it and our relation to far-away others. Media Representations and the Global Imagination will be of particular interest to students and scholars of media and cultural studies, as well as sociology, politics, international relations, development studies and migration studies.







The Informal Media Economy


Book Description

How are “grey market” imports changing media industries? What is the role of piracy in developing new markets for movies and TV shows? How do jailbroken iPhones drive innovation? The Informal Media Economy provides a vivid, original, and genuinely transnational account of contemporary media, by showing how the interactions between formal and informal media systems are a feature of all nations – rich and poor, large and small. Shifting the focus away from the formal businesses and public enterprises that have long occupied media researchers, this book charts a parallel world of cultural intermediaries driving global media production and circulation. It shows how unlicensed, untaxed, or unregulated networks, which operate across the boundaries of established media markets, have been a driving force of media industry transformation. The book opens up new insights on a range of topical issues in media studies, from the creative disruptions of digitisation to amateur production, piracy and cybercrime.




Listening Publics


Book Description

In focusing on the practices, politics and ethics of listening, this wide-ranging book offers an important new perspective on questions of media audiences, publics and citizenship. Listening is central to modern communication, politics and experience, but is commonly overlooked and underestimated in a culture fascinated by the spectacle and the politics of voice. Listening Publics restores listening to media history and to theories of the public sphere. In so doing it opens up profound questions for our understanding of mediated experience, public participation and civic engagement. Taking a cross-national and interdisciplinary approach, the book explores how listening publics have been constituted in relation to successive media technologies from the invention of writing to the digital age. It asks how new practices of listening associated with sound and audiovisual media transform a public world forged in the age of print. Through detailed histories and sophisticated theoretical analysis, Listening Publics demonstrates the embodied and critical activity of listening to be a rich concept with which to rethink the practices, politics and ethics of media communication.




On Ovid's Metamorphoses


Book Description

Ovid’s Metamorphoses has entranced audiences for two thousand years, from Rome under Augustus to humanities classrooms today. Borrowing liberally from Greek and Roman mythology, the poem tells hundreds of stories that share one essential theme: each tale depicts a transformation from one physical form into another. Drawing on many years of teaching the Metamorphoses, Gareth Williams offers a brisk and lively reading of the poem that emphasizes why it speaks in compelling ways to a twenty-first-century audience. He shows how the Metamorphoses is not just a colorful collection of stories about change but an exploration of change itself. Ovid challenges us to recognize flux as fundamental to human experience: circumstances shift, fortunes ebb and flow, and our very identities ceaselessly evolve across from one life stage to another. Capturing the energy and excitement that Ovid’s poem generates among readers, Williams also sheds new light on its modern provocations. His fresh interpretations of the Metamorphoses reveal its power to enrich and inform our daily existence amid the uncertainties of life today.




New Media


Book Description




Media Industry Studies


Book Description

The study of media industries has become a thriving subfield of media studies. It already comprises a diverse intellectual history, a range of fascinating questions and topics, and many theoretical and methodological frameworks. Media Industry Studies provides the roadmap to this vibrant area of study. Blending a comprehensive overview of foundational literature with an examination of the varied scales and sites media industry studies have considered, the book explores connections among research questions, topics, and methodologies. It includes examples from many media industries – film, television, journalism, music, games – and incorporates emerging scholarship considering the industrial contexts of social and internet-distributed media. Offering an account of the intellectual traditions and approaches that have defined the subfield to date, Media Industry Studies is an indispensable resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars.




New Media and the Artaud Effect


Book Description

This book proposes, following Antonin Artaud, an investigation exploring the virtual body, neurology and the brain as fields of contestation, seeking a clearer understanding of Artaud's transformations that ultimately leads into examining the relevance Artaud may have for an adequate theory of the current media environment. New Media and the Artaud Effect is the only current full-length study of the relation of Artaud’s work to dilemmas of digital art, media and society today. It is also singular in that it combines a far-reaching discussion of the theoretical implications and ramifications of the ‘late’ or ‘final’ Artaud, with a treatment of individual media works, sometimes directly inspired from Artaud’s travails. Artaud has long been justly regarded as one of the seminal influences in mid- and late-20th century performance and theater: it is argued here that Artaud’s insights are if anything more applicable to digital/post-digital society and the plethora of works that are made possible by it.