International Journal of Communication, 8: Special Section: Media, Hot and Cold (2014)
Filed under journal | Tags: · climate, media, media studies, mediation, meteorology, temperature, weather
“The 21st century will be the century of temperature. As global temperatures rise, polar ice melts, and drought becomes a permanent way of life, temperature has become the single greatest challenge to human life on the planet.
Temperature is also a media problem in many ways: from the heat generated by new media—whether in our hands or in giant server farms; to the technologies used to measure, represent, and understand temperature; to the contribution of new media systems themselves to the problem of global warming. But this is not a new phenomenon. For centuries, media and mediation have been at the center of experiments in and beliefs about temperature and its relation to culture, gender, language, and life. In this special section, we take the 50th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media literally to ask “What are hot and cold media?””
Contributors: Alice Christensen, Wolfgang Ernst, Brenton J. Malin, Jessica Mudry, Dylan Mulvin, Lisa Parks, Rafico Ruiz, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, Marita Sturken.
Special section of the IJoC 8
Edited by Dylan Mulvin and Jonathan Sterne
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND License
ISSN 1932-8036
44 pages
PDF (single file)
PDFs (separate articles)
Grey Room 29: New German Media Theory (2007)
Filed under journal | Tags: · aesthetics, body, code, communication, computing, cultural techniques, cybernetics, information aesthetics, law, media, media studies, media theory, mediality, technology, theory, writing
“If asked for a definition of ‘media,’ the answer given by the authors included in this volume would likely be ‘Es gibt keine Medien’–‘There are no media.’ In 1993, Friedrich Kittler published the essay ‘There Is No Software.’ Three years later, Bernhard Siegert attacked one of the fetishes of the burgeoning German media studies of the 1990s by declaring that ‘There are no mass media.’ Such a dismissal of some of the core concepts of media studies–including any fixed concept of ‘media’ itself may well be the signature of the type of ‘new media theory’ presented by the modest collection of essays in this volume.” (from the Introduction)
With contributions by Eva Horn, Joseph Vogl, Bernhard Siegert, Philipp Sarasin, Herta Wolf, Cornelia Vismann and Markus Krajewski, and Claus Pias.
Edited by Eva Horn
Publisher MIT Press, Fall 2007
ISSN 1526-3819
133 pages
Es gibt kein PDF (removed on 2014-11-15 upon request of the publisher)
Comment (0)Lisa Gitelman: Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014)
Filed under book | Tags: · book, knowledge, media, media history, media studies, media technology, paper, print, technology
“Paper Knowledge is a book about the mundane: the library card, the promissory note, the movie ticket, the PDF (Portable Document Format). It is a media history of the document. Drawing examples from the 1870s, the 1930s, the 1960s, and today, Lisa Gitelman thinks across the media that the document form has come to inhabit over the last 150 years, including letterpress printing, typing and carbon paper, mimeograph, microfilm, offset printing, photocopying, and scanning. Whether examining late nineteenth century commercial, or ‘job’ printing, or the Xerox machine and the role of reproduction in our understanding of the document, Gitelman reveals a keen eye for vernacular uses of technology. She tells nuanced, anecdote-filled stories of the waning of old technologies and the emergence of new. Along the way, she discusses documentary matters such as the relation between twentieth-century technological innovation and the management of paper, and the interdependence of computer programming and documentation. Paper Knowledge is destined to set a new agenda for media studies.”
Publisher Duke University Press, 2014
Sign, Storage, Transmission series
ISBN 0822376768, 9780822376767
210 pages
Interview with the author: Trevor Owens (2014).
Reviews: Jan Baetens (Leonardo, 2014), Alexander von Lünen (2014), Hope Leman (2014), Colin Higgins (Times Higher Education, 2014).
PDF (updated on 2021-4-9)
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