"The observations shared in this book take the form of conversations about digital media and culture centered around four distinct thematic fields: politics and government, algorithm and censorship, art and aesthetics, as well as media literacy and education. Among the keywords discussed are: data m
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ining, algorithmic regulation, sharing culture, filter bubble, distant reading, power browsing, deep attention, transparent reader, interactive art, participatory culture. The interviewees (mostly from the US, but also from France, Brazil, and Denmark) were given a set of common questions as well specific inquiries tailored to their individual areas of interest and expertise. As a result, the book both identifies different takes on the same issues and enables a diversity of perspectives when it comes to the interviewees’ particular concerns." (Publisher description)
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"Inspired by Raymond Williams's 1976 classic 'Keywords', the timely collection Digital Keywords gathers pointed, provocative short essays on more than two dozen keywords by leading and rising digital media scholars from the areas of anthropology, digital humanities, history, political science, philo
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sophy, religious studies, rhetoric, science and technology studies, and sociology. Digital Keywords examines and critiques the rich lexicon animating the emerging field of digital studies. This collection broadens our understanding of how we talk about the modern world, particularly of the vocabulary at work in information technologies. Contributors scrutinize each keyword independently: for example, the recent pairing of digital and analog is separated, while classic terms such as community, culture, event, memory, and democracy are treated in light of their historical and intellectual importance. Metaphors of the cloud in cloud computing and the mirror in data mirroring combine with recent and radical uses of terms such as information, sharing, gaming, algorithm, and internet to reveal previously hidden insights into contemporary life. Bookended by a critical introduction and a list of over two hundred other digital keywords, these essays provide concise, compelling arguments about our current mediated condition." (Publisher description)
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"While a decade ago much of the discussion of new media in Asia was couched in Occidental notions of Asia as a "default setting" for technology in the future, today we are seeing a much more complex picture of contesting new media practices and production. As "new media" becomes increasingly an ever
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yday reality for young and old across Asia through smartphones and associated devices, boundaries between art, new media, and the everyday are transformed. This Handbook addresses the historical, social, cultural, political, philosophical, artistic and economic dimensions of the region's new media. Through an interdisciplinary revision of both "new media" and "Asia" the contributors provide new insights into the complex and contesting terrains of both notions." (Publisher description)
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"The first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of nine anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world, including Brazil, Chile, China, England, India, Italy, Trinidad and Turkey. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the re
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sults of the research and exploring the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet? Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences." (Back cover)
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"This book presents an ethnographic study of social media in Mardin, a medium-sized town located in the Kurdish region of Turkey. The town is inhabited mainly by Sunni Muslim Arabs and Kurds, and has been transformed in recent years by urbanisation, neoliberalism and political events. Elisabetta Cos
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ta uses her 15 months of ethnographic research to explain why public facing social media is more conservative than offline life. Yet, at the same time, social media has opened up unprecedented possibilities for private communications between genders and in relationships among young people. Costa reveals new worlds of intimacy, love and romance. She also discovers that, when viewed from the perspective of people's everyday lives, political participation on social media looks very different to how it is portrayed in studies of political postings separated from their original complex, and highly socialised, context." (Publisher description)
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"Kaum ein Ort der Erde, der nicht digital vermessen oder erfasst ist, kaum ein Lebensbereich ohne digitale Steuerung, Erleichterung und Optimierung. Die Schattenseite der Digitalisierung bestehe, so Andre Wilkens, in ihrem Potenzial zur Erfassung, Kontrolle und Manipulation. Er stellt in diesem Buch
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beides einander gegenüber: die noch immer nicht ausgelotete Fülle der Chancen, die Erde mittels digitaler Technik lebenswerter zu machen, und die bedrohlichen Szenarien von Gesellschaften, in denen nichts mehr individuell oder verborgen bleibt. Die schwierige Aufgabe, einen humanen Weg der Digitalisierung zu finden, habe, so Wilkens, jede und jeder für sich zu bewältigen." (Klappentext)
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"This book brings together several key anthropologists working with digital culture to demonstrate just how productive an anthropological approach to the digital has already become. Through a range of case studies from Facebook to Second Life to Google Earth, Digital Anthropology explores how human
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and digital can be defined in relation to one another, from avatars and disability; cultural differences in how we use social networking sites or practise religion; the practical consequences of the digital for politics, museums, design, space and development to new online world and gaming communities. The book also explores the moral universe of the digital, from new anxieties to open-source ideals. Digital Anthropology reveals how only the intense scrutiny of ethnography can overturn assumptions about the impact of digital culture and reveal its profound consequences for everyday life." (Publisher description)
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"Ce livre présente un répertoire de vingt-six concepts qui décrivent de manière synthetique les enjeux théoriques et critiques autour de la création hypermédiatique, plus spécifiquement les oeuvres artistiques et littéraires conçues pour une diffusion sur Internet. Il accompagne une exposi
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tion virtuelle du même nom, produite et diffusée par le Laboratoire NT2 de l'UQAM." (Introduction)
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"Eager to assist, organize, and structure our lifestream logistics, new corporate actors offer communicative freedoms based on commercial user-as-product philosophies of expression. But we now design our own interfaces to face our others, our algorithmic others. Our collective reflection on nature a
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s machinic assemblage has yielded functional foods and the financialization of agriculture. But networked selves already develop other ecologies, reclaiming social machines as technologies of the common, unearthing the conflicts covered in disaster-driven environmentalities whose horizon is delimited by energy security and resource efficiency. Both helped and hindered by the ontological resonances of the common, these ecologies remain fragile, not yet structured by a politics of rights, animated by an interest in the autonomy of things. As nature continues to seep across the curriculum, research and education struggle to keep track of the corrosion of their institutional frameworks. Powered by a cartographic vision unconstrained by the statist political imagination, the study of supply chains has already become a paradigmatic form of transdisciplinarity, moving across the boundaries of life and labor, tracking every speck of dust on the scratch-free screens of our mobile economies as a reminder of the complexities of mutual constitution. The question of depletion is the question of the institution, of what it means when subjects and objects join in a refusal of roles in the great games of reification. No accident, perhaps, that philosophies of play are back, not quite a renaissance of aesthetic experience, but an affirmation of the openness of objective and subjective constitution. Of these and other knowledges so created, there can no longer be an encyclopedia; a glossary, perhaps. This is its initial iteration, its entries conjoined by a logic of connotation and constellation." (Page 5)
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"The Social Media Reader is the first collection to address the collective transformation with pieces on social media, peer production, copyright politics, and other aspects of contemporary internet culture from all the major thinkers in the field. Culling a broad range and incorporating different s
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tyles of scholarship from foundational pieces and published articles to unpublished pieces, journalistic accounts, personal narratives from blogs, and whitepapers, The Social Media Reader promises to be an essential text, with contributions from Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, Tim O'Reilly, Chris Anderson, Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, and Fred von Loehmann, to name a few. It covers a wide-ranging topical terrain, much like the internet itself, with particular emphasis on collaboration and sharing, the politics of social media and social networking, Free Culture and copyright politics, and labor and ownership. Theorizing new models of collaboration, identity, commerce, copyright, ownership, and labor, these essays outline possibilities for cultural democracy that arise when the formerly passive audience becomes active cultural creators, while warning of the dystopian potential of new forms of surveillance and control." (Publisher description)
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"This book is about the many ways in which mobile phones are being appropriated by Africans and how they are transforming and are being transformed by society in Africa. A case study from Karthoum (Sudan) shows, how mobile phones are reshaping relationships in a Muslim society, where they enable wom
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en to organize their lives more independently. In Cameroon, the mobile allows traditional healers to assist sick people who are originally from their area but are now far away, sometimes even in Europe or the USA. Another study from Burkina Faso highlights the growing importance of text messaging - as contrary to the overstated orality both of African societies and of the mobile phone. The nine chapters in this volume all show aspects of an emerging mobile culture, be it the linkage between the rural and the urban in Burkina Faso, the youth in Ghana or traders in Tanzania. In all of these, the authors observe a reshaping of social and economic hierarchies in society. Based on the illustrative case studies and its multi-dimensional approach this book is highly recommended reading." (CAMECO Update 3-2009)
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"From Facebook to the iPhone, from YouTube to Wikipedia, from Grand Auto Theft to Second Life, this book explores media's important issues and debates. It covers topics such as digital television, digital cinema, game culture, digital democracy, the World Wide Web, digital news, online social networ
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king, music & multimedia and virtual communities." (Publisher description)
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"Seit den 1980er Jahren setzt sich die indigene Bevölkerung Brasiliens verstärkt für ihre Rechte in der Gesellschaft ein. Kommunikation spielt hierbei eine entscheidende Rolle - besonders das Internet gewinnt als Medium im Alltag indigener Gemeinschaften immer mehr an Bedeutung. Aber wie wird das
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Internet eingesetzt und zu welchen Zwecken? Wie eignen sie sich dieses Medium an und welche kulturellen Prozesse entstehen dabei? Die Autorin untersucht diese Fragen ethnographisch und geht dabei sowohl auf die gesamtgesellschaftlichen Aspekte der Internetnutzung durch die Indigenen als auch auf ihre Bedeutung im Alltag dieser Gemeinschaften ein." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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