Raymond Williams: Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974–)

“Twenty-first century TV offers an apparently endless stream of images, unfolding at high speed. We no longer watch individual programs but flick from channel to channel, absorbing a continuous flow of news, game shows, comedy, drama, movies, advertising and trailers. Television: Technology and Cultural Form was first published in 1974, long before the dawn of multi-channel TV, or the reality and celebrity shows that now pack the schedules. Yet Williams’ analysis of television’s history, its institutions, programs and practices, and its future prospects, remains remarkably prescient. TV offers an apparently endless engagement with a flood of Williams stresses the importance of technology in shaping the cultural form of television, while always resisting the determinism of Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that “the medium is the message”. If the medium really is the message, Williams asks, what is left for us to do or say? Williams argues that, on the contrary, we as viewers have the power to disturb, disrupt and to distract the otherwise cold logic of history and technology – not just because television is part of the fabric of our daily lives, but because new technologies continue to offer opportunities, momentarily outside the sway of transnational corporations or the grasp of media moguls, for new forms of self and political expression.”

First published by Fontana, London, 1974

Edited by Ederyn Williams
With a New Preface by Roger Silverstone
Publisher Routledge, 2003
ISBN 0415314569, 9780415314565
xvii+172 pages

Keywords and phrases
KQED, Fihn, Anacin, telegraphy, technological determinism, satellite television, Britain, Tony Hancock, Sesame Street, cable television, music-hall, Cathy Come Home, Masterpiece Theatre, analysis of flow, five channels, dumbshow, privatised, Golden Gate Bridge, Lord Lambton

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Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, Matthias Böttger (eds.): Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level (2007)

“Computer and video games are leaving the PC and conquering the arena of everyday life in the form of mobile applications (such as GPS cell phones, etc.) – the result is new types of cities and architecture. How do these games alter our perception of real and virtual space? What can the designers of physical and digital worlds learn from one another? Space Time Play presents the following themes: the superimposition of computer games on real spaces and convergences of real and imaginary playspaces; computer and video games as practical planning instruments.”

With articles by Espen Aarseth, Ernest Adams, Richard A. Bartle, Ian Bogost, Gerhard M. Buurman, Edward Castranova, Kees Christiaanse, Drew Davidson, James Der Derian, Noah Falstein, Stephen Graham, Ludger Hovestadt, Henry Jenkins, Heather Kelley, James Korris, Julian Kücklich, Frank Lantz, Lev Manovich, Jane McGonigal, William J. Mitchell, Kas Oosterhuis, Katie Salen, Mark Wigley, and others.

Publisher Springer, 2007
ISBN 376438414X, 9783764384142
495 pages

Keywords and phrases
SimCity, Pac-Man, computer games, video games, gamespace, id Software, Perplex City, locative media, game designers, first-person shooter, virtual worlds, Augmented Reality, Linden Lab, ubiquitous computing, LARP, Counter-Strike, MMORPGs, Super Mario Bros, Spacewar, Blizzard Entertainment

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Mary Flanagan, Austin Booth (eds.): Re:skin (2007)

In re: skin, scholars, essayists and short story writers offer their perspectives on skin—as boundary and surface, as metaphor and physical reality. The twenty-first century and its attendant technology call for a new investigation of the intersection of body, skin, and technology. These cutting-edge writings address themes of skin and bodily transformation in an era in which we are able not only to modify our own skins—by plastic surgery, tattooing, skin graft art, and other methods—but to cross skins, merging with other bodies or colonizing multiple bodies.

The book’s agile crossings of disciplinary and genre boundaries enact the very transformations they discuss. A short story imagines a manufactured maternal interface that allows a man to become pregnant, and a scholar describes the evolution of “body criticism”; a writer uses “faux science” to explore animal prints on faux fur, and fictional lovers experience one another’s sexual sensations through the slipping on and off of skin-like bodysuits. Ubiquitous computational interfaces are considered as the “skin” of technology, and questions of race and color are shown to play out in digital art practice. The essays and narratives gathered in re: skin claim that the new technologically mutable body is neither purely liberating nor simply limiting; instead, these pieces show us models, ways of living in a technological culture.

Contributors:
Austin Booth, Rebecca Cannon, Model T and Sara D(iamond), L. Timmel Duchamp, Mary Flanagan, Jewelle Gomez, Jennifer Gonzalez, Nalo Hopkinson, Alicia Imperiale, Shelley Jackson, Christina Lammer, David J. Leonard, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Melinda Rackham, Vivian Sobchack, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Bernadette Wegenstein

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
Original from the University of Michigan
ISBN 0262062607, 9780262062602
Length 356 pages

Keywords and phrases
avatar, Lynx, carapace, NFL Street, Issy, uterus, video games, Cleve, VRML, Melinda Rackham, Lara Croft, EverQuest, wetsuit, Posthuman, Shelley Jackson, interventional radiology, phenomenology, MMORPGs, sports games, Blast Theory

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