MEDIA (volume)

 

MEDIA: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry
Jeremy Swartz and Janet Wasko, Editors

Intellect Ltd. / University of Chicago Press
ePDF | ePUB | JSTOR / Hardcover | Softcover

Published May 2021

MEDIA: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry explores evolving meanings of media and interrogates how media technologies are transforming media theory and practice. The collection addresses the emerging roles of media across a wide range of disciplines, featuring contributions from an array of internationally known scholars and practitioners.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface to a Trilogy
Introduction

PART I: GENEALOGY
1. When Multimedia Meant Democracy, Fred Turner
2. Four Reporting Cultures: Designing Humans In and Out of the Future of Journalism, John Markoff
3. Dark Materials: Media, Machines, Markets, Graham Murdock

PART II: MEANINGS OF MEDIA
4. A Community of Media: There Is a There There, Sean Cubitt
5. Media as Cultural Techniques: From Inscribed Surfaces to Digitalized Interfaces, Sybille Krämer
6. Understanding “Medium” in the Context of the Media Ecology Tradition, Lance Strate

PART III: ORGANS AND ORGANIZATION
7. Between Media Studies and Organizational Communication: Organizing as the Creation of Organs, François Cooren & Frédérik Matte
8. Paradigms for Creative Industry Research, Angela McRobbie
9. The Politics of Mediation: Colonization to Co-Generative Democracy, Stanley Deetz

PART IV: ENGAGEMENTS AND EXTENSIONS
10. Phantasmal Selves: Computational Approaches to Understanding Virtual Identities, D. Fox Harrell
11. Calm Technology/Media and the Limit of Attention, Amber Case
12. The Next Internet, Vincent Mosco

PART V: BIOMEDIATIONS
13. Biological Dimensions of Media Ecology and Its Relationship to Biosemiotics, Robert K. Logan
14. Biomediations: From “Life in Media” to “Living Media,” Joanna Zylinska
15. Lynn Hershman Leeson: “The Infinity Engine,” Ingeborg Reichle

PART VI: REPAIR AND METAMEDIA
16. No Issues Without Media: The Changing Politics of Public Controversy in Digital Societies, Noortje Marres
17. The Poetics and Political Economy of Repair, Steven J. Jackson & Lara Houston
18. Metamedia, Jeremy Swartz

APPENDIX
Exhibition • Experience • Music

Notes on Contributors
Index

REVIEWS

The creative imagination of this book is astonishing. The brilliance of transdisciplinarity in these intellectually innovative chapters represents a historic turning point in media theory and research. Instead of timid steps, we need to urgently reconceptualize mediation, systems, networks, platforms, criticism, and materiality. This collection is an educational earthquake.
Clifford G. Christians, Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Bringing together the natural and exact sciences, humanities and arts, this volume puts forward unexpected conceptual conversations, puzzling inquiries, and dynamic lines of action. Its key motivation is to challenge scholars, students, and the public based on vision, solid knowledge and imagination. This book could not be more timely!
Helena Sousa, Professor of Communication Sciences, University of Minho

With a stellar cast of contributors, this insightful volume urges us to reimagine how media can be understood and reconceptualized as more than merely technological artifacts in isolation. The time is right for scholarship and praxis to move beyond binaries and reductions toward magnifying complexity, thus strengthening our critiques.
Karin Gwinn Wilkins, Dean, School of Communication, University of Miami

Critical, multifaceted and eye-opening, this kaleidoscopic volume illuminates the past, present and future of communication and media studies. Democratize media or face increasing existential crises — the struggle goes on. This book will be a definitive meeting place for concerned scholars, citizens and activists alike.
Jack Linchuan Qiu, Professor and Research Director, Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore

Spanning historical perspectives, contemporary concerns, and practical agendas, this volume provides an essential starting point for a transdisciplinary conversation on media and communication as both objects and modes of inquiry.
Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Professor, Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication, University of Copenhagen

This volume contributes exceptional scholarly insights and a significant force urging us to think and act critically, moving beyond narrow conceptualizations. It brings opportunities to build new conversations and encourage cross-cultural inquiries. A must-read piece of contemporary scholarly work.
Changfeng Chen, Executive Dean and Professor of Journalism, Tsinghua University

If the editors set out to shake up tried and true approaches to understanding media, they have succeeded. This assemblage is an open-ended universe of starting and ending points, patterns, and paradigms. Underlying it all is a quest for advancing towards not more entertaining consumer goods, but more full-throated democratic and just communities.
Lana F. Rakow, Professor Emerita, University of North Dakota

What are media and their significance in the contemporary complexity of culture, social life, environment, and power today? This provocative book offers cross-cutting and panoramic views on a topic essential to us all. An elegant, compelling, and must-read first installment of an emerging trilogy.
Gerard Goggin, Professor and Wee Kim Wee Chair in Communication Studies, Nanyang Technological University

This is the first volume in the MEDIA • LIFE • UNIVERSE Trilogy. LIFE: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry follows and builds upon this 2021 collection.