Brian Winston: Media Technology and Society. A History From the Printing Press to the Superhighway (1998)

How are media born? How do they change? And how do they change us?

Media Technology and Society offers a comprehensive account of the history of communications technologies, from the printing press to the internet. Brian Winston argues that the development of new media, from the telegraph and the telephone to computers, satellite and virtual reality, is the product of a constant play-off between social necessity and suppression: the unwritten law by which new technologies are introduced into society only insofar as their disruptive potential is limited. Winston’s fascinating account examines the role played by individuals such as Alexander Graham Bell, Gugliemo Marconi, John Logie Baird, Boris Rozing and Charles Babbage, and challenges the popular myth of the present-day “information revolution.”

Publisher Routledge, 1998
ISBN 041514230X, 9780415142304
374 pages

Keywords and phrases
ENIAC, AT&T, Bell Labs, EDVAC, cathode ray tube, Intelsat, Bletchley Park, integrated circuit, UNIVAC, selenium, microprocessor, point-contact transistor, iconoscope, ARPANET, NTSC, solid state electronics, However, differential analyser, holography, Entscheidungsproblem

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Roger Silverstone: Television And Everyday Life (1994)

Television and Everyday Life explores the enigma of television, and how it has insinuated its way so profoundly and intimately into our daily lives. The book unravels television’s emotional, cognitive, spatial, temporal and political significance.

Drawing from a broad range of literature–from psychoanalysis to sociology, from geography to cultural studies–Roger Silverstone constructs a theory which places television in a central position within the various realities and discourses which construct everyday life. The medium emerges from these arguments as a fascinating, complex phenomenon of contradictions, yet the book explodes many of the myths surrounding what has been called “The Love Machine”.

Television and Everyday Life presents a radical new approach to the medium, one that both challenges closely-held wisdoms, and offers a compellingly original view of where telvision sits in everyday life.

Publisher Routledge, 1994
ISBN 0415016479, 9780415016476
Length 204 pages

Keywords and phrases
soap opera, ontological security, television, moral economy, Silverstone, mass media, suburbanisation, situation comedy, Frankfurt School, post-modern, phenomenology, commodification, Marilyn Strathern, polysemy, Radway, sit-coms, David Morley, Daniel Miller, object relations theory, privatisation

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Lisa Nakamura: Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (2007)

In the nineties, neoliberalism simultaneously provided the context for the Internet’s rapid uptake in the United States and discouraged public conversations about racial politics. At the same time many scholars lauded the widespread use of text-driven interfaces as a solution to the problem of racial intolerance. Today’s online world is witnessing text-driven interfaces such as e-mail and instant messaging giving way to far more visually intensive and commercially driven media forms that not only reveal but showcase people’s racial, ethnic, and gender identity.

Lisa Nakamura, a leading scholar in the examination of race in digital media, uses case studies of popular yet rarely examined uses of the Internet such as pregnancy Web sites, instant messaging, and online petitions and quizzes to look at the emergence of race-, ethnic-, and gender-identified visual cultures.

While popular media such as Hollywood cinema continue to depict nonwhite nonmales as passive audiences or consumers of digital media rather than as producers, Nakamura argues the contrary—with examples ranging from Jennifer Lopez music videos; films including the Matrix trilogy, Gattaca, and Minority Report; and online joke sites—that users of color and women use the Internet to vigorously articulate their own types of virtual community, avatar bodies, and racial politics.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2007
ISBN 0816646139, 9780816646135
248 pages

Keywords and phrases
Asian American, visual culture, avatars, Internet, digital signatures, buddy icons, Minority Report, racial formation, African Americans, codetalkers, cyberpunk, Matrix trilogy, Details magazine, Jennifer Lopez, digital divide, posthuman, racial project, racism, However, Agent Smith

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