Régis Debray: Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms (1994/1996)

Media Manifestos sums up over a decade of Régis Debray’s research and writing on the evolution of systems of communication. Debray announces the battle-readiness of a new sub-discipline of the sciences humaines: “mediology.” Scion of that semiology of the sixties linked with the names of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco — and trans-Atlantically affiliated to the semiotics of C.S. Peirce and the media analyses of Marshall McLuhan (“medium is message”) — “mediology” is yet in (dialectical) revolt against its parent thought-system. Determined not to lapse back into the empiricism and psychologism with which semiology broke, mediology is just as resolved to dispel the illusion of the signifier, slough off the scolasticism of the code, and recover the world — in all its mediatized materiality.

Written with Debray’s customary brio, Media Manifestos is no mere contribution to “media studies.” Steeped in the intellectual ethos of Althusser and Foucault, informed by the historical work of the Annales school, and yet plugged in to today’s audiovisual culture, Debray’s book turns a neologism (“mediology”) into a tool-kit with which to rethink the whole business of mediation.

First published as Manifestes médiologiques, Gallimard, 1994.

Translated by Eric Rauth
Publisher Verso, 1996
ISBN 1859840876, 9781859840870
179 pages

Review (Imre Szeman, Cultural Logic, 1998)
Review (John Conomos, RealTime, 1997)

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Forum: Edinburgh University Postgraduate Journal of Culture & The Arts 8: Technologies (2009)

Technologies allow us to interrogate what material objects, techniques and systems of knowledge are made and how they are produced.

The 8th issue of Forum engages with a range of questions concerning the definitions, meanings, applications and representations of technologies. The three guest articles by distinguished technology scholars deal with technologies and embodiment in Doctor Who, Marcuse’s aesthetics, and the figure of the independent inventor. The following articles explore the significance of technologies across the fields of literary and film studies, history and art history as well as media studies.

The wide variety of articles from different disciplines highlight the interdisciplinary nature of technologies, and the complexity of the term ‘technology’ itself.

Issue 8, Spring 2009 – Technologies
Editorial board: Ally Crockford, Lena Wanggren, Jack David Burton, Jana Funke, Kim Treharne Richmond, Ana Salzberg.
Publisher: University of Edinburgh, Graduate School of the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures

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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

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PDF (updated on 2012-7-15)