Janet Staiger, Sabine Hake (eds.): Convergence Media History (2009)

Convergence Media History explores the ways that digital convergence has radically changed the field of media history. Writing media history is no longer a matter of charting the historical development of an individual medium such as film or television. Instead, now that various media from blockbuster films to everyday computer use intersect regularly via convergence, scholars must find new ways to write media history across multiple media formats. This collection of eighteen new essays by leading media historians and scholars examines the issues today in writing media history and histories. Each essay addresses a single medium—including film, television, advertising, sound recording, new media, and more—and connects that specific medium’s history to larger issues for the field in writing multi-media or convergent histories. Among the volume’s topics are new media technologies and their impact on traditional approaches to media history; alternative accounts of film production and exhibition, with a special emphasis on film across multiple media platforms; the changing relationships between audiences, fans, and consumers within media culture; and the globalization of our media culture.

Publisher Taylor and Francis, 2009
ISBN 0415996619, 9780415996617
212 pages

publisher
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Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler: Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews (1996/2002)

“In this book, Jacques Derrida talks with Bernard Stiegler about the effect of teletechnologies on our philosophical and political moment. Improvising before a camera, the two philosophers are confronted by the very technologies they discuss and so are forced to address all the more directly the urgent questions that they raise. What does it mean to speak of the present in a situation of “live” recording? How can we respond, responsibly, to a question when we know that the so-called “natural” conditions of expression, discussion, reflection, and deliberation have been breached?

As Derrida and Stiegler discuss the role of teletechnologies in modern society, the political implications of Derrida’s thought become apparent. Drawing on recent events in Europe, Derrida and Stiegler explore the impact of television and the internet on our understanding of the state, its borders and citizenship. Their discussion examines the relationship between the juridical and the technical, and it shows how new technologies for manipulating and transmitting images have influenced our notions of democracy, history and the body. The book opens with a shorter interview with Derrida on the news media, and closes with a provocative essay by Stiegler on the epistemology of digital photography.”

First published as Echographies de la télévision – Entretiens filmés, Galilée, Paris, 1996.

Translated by Jennifer Bajorek
Publisher Polity Press, 2002
ISBN 0745620361, 9780745620367
174 pages

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Mark Andrejevic: Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (2004)

Drawing on cultural theory and interviews with fans, cast members and producers, this book places the reality TV trend within a broader social context, tracing its relationship to the development of a digitally enhanced, surveillance-based interactive economy and to a savvy mistrust of mediated reality in general. Surveying several successful reality TV formats, the book links the rehabilitation of “Big Brother” to the increasingly important economic role played by the work of being watched. The author enlists critical social theory to examine how the appeal of “the real” is deployed as a pervasive but false promise of democratization.

Publisher Rowman & Littlefield, 2004
Series: Critical Media Studies: Institutions, Politics, and Culture
ISBN 0742527484, 9780742527485
Length 253 pages

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