MediaMatters

In this edited volume, eighteen scholars examine the increasing role of digital media technologies in identity construction through play. Going beyond computer games, this interdisciplinary collection argues that present-day play and games are not only appropriate metaphors for capturing postmodern human identities, but are in fact the means by which people create their identity. From discussions of World of Warcraft and Foursquare to digital cartographies, the combined essays form a groundbreaking volume that features the most recent insights in play and game studies, media research, and identity studies.

Mobile Screens captures the ways in which we engage with screens as interfaces with spatial, temporal, and haptic experiences.

While studies of mobile wireless communication devices usually focus on their social implications, De Vries proposes to venture into a more historical and comparative direction to shed light on our preoccupation with them in the first place. He constructs an archaeological view of the development of communication technologies over the past 200 years, providing a comprehensive account of how persistent hopes and beliefs have come to give mobile wireless media such a prominent position today. Our expectations and uses of them are surprisingly similar to those of older media; consequently, they reconfirm the idea that living in an ‘anyone, anything, anytime, anywhere’ world is both a blessing and a curse, and that the desire for sublime communication is a tragic yet highly powerful regulative principle in our media evolution.

Anatomy Live demonstrates how the implications of the history of anatomical theatre can be seen at work in the appearance of dancing and acting bodies on stage.

aking up the challenges of the datafication of culture, as well as of the scholarship of cultural inquiry itself, this collection contributes to the critical debate about data and algorithms. How can we understand the quality and significance of current socio-technical transformations that result from datafication and algorithmization? How can we explore the changing conditions and contours for living within such new and changing frameworks? How can, or should we, think and act within, but also in response to these conditions?

This collection brings together various perspectives on the datafication and algorithmization of culture from debates and disciplines within the field of cultural inquiry, specifically (new) media studies, game studies, urban studies, screen studies, and gender and postcolonial studies. It proposes conceptual and methodological directions for exploring where, when, and how data and algorithms (re)shape cultural practices, create (in)justice, and (co)produce knowledge.

"So you're the one getting this gift? Lucky you!
Someone who knows you has visited the museum.
They searched out things they thought you would care about, and they took photos and left messages for you."

This is the welcoming message for the Gift app, designed to create a very personal museum visit. Hybrid Museum Experiences use new technologies to augment, expand or alter the physical experience of visiting the museum. They are designed to be experienced in close relation to the physical space and exhibit. In this book we discuss three forms of hybridity in museum experiences: Incorporating the digital and the physical, creating social, yet personal and intimate experiences, and exploring ways to balance visitor participation and museum curation.
This book reports on a 3-year cross-disciplinary research project in which artists, design researchers and museum professionals have collaborated to create technology-mediated experiences that merge with the museum environment.

Screens are ubiquitous today. Yet contemporary screen media eliminate the presence of the screen and diminish the visibility of its boundaries. As the image becomes indistinguishable from the viewer’s surroundings, this unsettling prompts re.examination of how screen boundaries demarcate. Through readings of three media forms – Virtual Reality; holograms; and light projections – this book develops new theories of the surfaces on and spaces in which images are displayed. Interrogating contemporary contestations of reality against illusion, it argues that the disappearance of difference reflects shifted conditions of actuality and virtuality in understanding the human condition. These shifts further connect to the current state of politics by way of their distorted truth values, corrupted terms of information, and internalizations of difference. The Post.Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections thus thinks anew the image’s borders and delineations, evoking the screen boundary as an instrumentation of today’s intense virtualizations which do not tell the truth. In the process, a new imagination for images emerges for a gluttony of the virtual; for new conceptualizations of object and representation, materiality and energies, media and histories, real and unreal; for new understandings of appearances, dis-appearances, replacement and re.placement – the post-screen.

‘Trolls for Trump’, virtual rape, fake news — social media discourse, including forms of virtual and real violence, has become a formidable, yet elusive, political force. What characterizes online vitriol? How do we understand the narratives generated, and also address their real-world — even life-and-death— impact? How can hatred, bullying, and dehumanization on social media platforms be addressed and countered in a post-truth world? Violence and Trolling on Social Media: History, Affect, and Effects of Online Vitriol unpacks discourses, metaphors, dynamics, and framing on social media, in order to begin to answer these questions. Written for and by cultural and media studies scholars, journalists, political philosophers, digital communication professionals, activists and advocates, this book connects theoretical approaches from cultural and media studies with practical challenges and experiences ‘from the field’, providing insight into a rough media landscape.

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in and through the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It investigates the rise of self-tracking, quantified self and informal practices of care at distance as part of contemporary household dynamics.

Screen Space Reconfigured is the first edited volume that critically and theoretically examines the many novel renderings of space brought to us by 21st century screens. Exploring key cases such as post-perspectival space, 3D, vertical framing, haptics, and layering, this volume takes stock of emerging forms of screen space and spatialities as they move from the margins to the centre of contemporary media practice. Recent years have seen a marked scholarly interest in spatial dimensions and conceptions of moving image culture, with some theorists claiming that a 'spatial turn' has taken place in media studies and screen practices alike. Yet this is the first book-length study dedicated to on-screen spatiality as such. Spanning mainstream cinema, experimental film, video art, mobile screens, and stadium entertainment, the volume includes contributions from such acclaimed authors as Giuliana Bruno and Tom Gunning as well as a younger generation of scholars.

Body, Capital and Screens: Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century brings together new research from leading scholars from Europe and North America working at the intersection of film and media studies and social and cultural history of the body. The volume focuses on visual media in the twentieth century in Europe and the U.S. that informed and educated people about life and health as well as practices improving them. Through a series of in-depth case studies, the contributors to this volume investigate the relationships between film/television, private and public actors of the health sector and economic developments. The book explores the performative and interactive power of these visual media on individual health understandings, perceptions and practices. Body, Capital and Screens aims to better understand how bodily health has evolved as a form of capital throughout the century.

This book presents the first in-depth discussion of how specific geographical and historical conditions shape the way in which mobile phone maps are read, deployed, and engaged with in daily life.

This book describes, historicizes, theorizes, and creatively deploys massive media -- a set of techno-social assemblages and practices -- in order to better understand their critical and creative potential.

Against the grain of the growing literature on screens, Screen Genealogies argues that the present excess of screens cannot be understood as an expansion and multiplication of the movie screen, nor of the video display.

Movie Circuits is a book about cinema; more precisely, it is about how technological changes are negotiated within the operation of the medium, thus resulting in the preservation, obsolescence and expansion of its conventional apparatus.

In this book, Anne-Marie Schleiner explores a concept she calls 'ludic mutation', a transformative process in which players seize back some of the power otherwise lost to the game itself.

Increasingly, young people live online, with the vast majority of their social and cultural interactions conducted through means other than face-to-face conversation. How does this transition impact the ways in which young migrants understand, negotiate, and perform identity? That's the question taken up by Digital Passages: Migrant Youth 2.0, a ground-breaking analysis of the ways that youth culture online interacts with issues of diaspora, gender, and belonging. Drawing on surveys, in-depth interviews, and ethnography, Koen Leurs builds an interdisciplinary portrait of online youth culture and the spaces it opens up for migrant youth to negotiate power relations and to promote intercultural understanding.

The massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft has become one of the most popular computer games of the past decade, introducing millions around the world to community-based play. Within the boundaries set by its design, the game encourages players to appropriate and shape the game to their own wishes, resulting in highly diverse forms of play and participation. This illuminating study frames World of Warcraft as a complex socio-cultural phenomenon defined by and evolving as a result of the negotiations between groups of players as well as the game’s owners, throwing new light on complex consumer-producer relationships in the increasingly participatory but still tightly controlled media of online games.

In the wake of the recent far-reaching changes in the use and accessibility of technology in our society, the average person is far more engaged with digital culture than ever before. They are not merely subject to technological advances but actively use, create, and mold them in everyday routines—connecting with loved ones and strangers through the Internet and smart phones, navigating digital worlds for work and recreation, extracting information from vast networks, and even creating and customizing interfaces to best suit their needs. In this timely work, Mirko Tobias Schäfer delves deep into the realities of user participation, the forms it takes, and the popular discourse around new media. Drawing on extensive research into hacking culture, fan communities, and Web 2.0 applications, Schäfer offers a critical approach to the hype around user participation and exposes the blurred boundaries between industry-driven culture and the domain of the user.