Glen Creeber, Royston Martin (eds.): Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media (2008)

From Facebook to the iPhone, from YouTube to Wikipedia, from Grand Theft Auto to Second Life – this book explores new media?s most important issues and debates in an accessible and engaging text for newcomers to the field.

With technological change continuing to unfold at an incredible rate, Digital Cultures rounds-up major events in the media?s recent past to help develop a clear understanding of the theoretical and practical debates that surround this emerging discipline. It addresses issues such as:

* What is new media?
* How is new media changing our lives?
* Is new media having a positive or negative effect on culture and human communication?

Each chapter contains case studies which provide an interesting and lively balance between the well-trodden and the newly emerging themes in the field.

Topics covered include digital television, digital cinema, gaming, digital democracy, mobile phones, the World Wide Web, digital news, online social networking, music and multimedia, virtual communities and the digital divide.

Digital Cultures is an essential introductory guide for all media and communication studies students, as well as those with a general interest in new media and its impact on the world around us.

Publisher Open University Press, 2008
ISBN 0335221971, 9780335221974
Length 205 pages

publisher
google books

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Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture – 1st free issue (2009)

We commence publication of Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture with a special issue on what we believe is a matter of considerable interest. It begins with a question: ‘Do recent developments in the media – convergence, interactivity, Web 2.0 in short, mean that we need to reassess how we think about the media, how we research into it and how we write and teach about it?’ The guest editor, Paul Taylor, has assembled a very serious and lively exploration of the notion of Media Studies 2.0 which we hope, and fully expect, will lead to further discussion in these pages and elsewhere.

Now to move on to our overall publishing policy: this will be a eneralist journal. It is our intention to publish the best work from the widest possible range, by subject matter and by approach: theoretical, empirical and historical of current research in communication and culture. Sometimes, as here, issues will be themed, others will be more general so that in the round, over time, our pages will address all interests. Our subject matter will be international, as will our contributors and we welcome submissions from both better and lesser known academics and departments. We will return to important topics with the intention of establishing informed, scholarly  conversations on matters of note. As in the best fiction, our ournal will have multiple storylines, and like good Cubists we will look at our subject from every possible angle.

Contents:

Editorial
Authors: Anthony McNicholas, Tarik Sabry, Mascha Brichta, Alessandro D’Arma, Daniel Day, Janne Halttu, Sofia Johansson, Salvo Scifo, Burcu Sumer and Xin Xin

Editorial introduction – Optimism, pessimism and the myth of technological neutrality
Authors: Paul A. Taylor

Media Studies 2.0: upgrading and open-sourcing the discipline
Authors: William Merrin

Critical Media Studies 2.0: an interactive upgrade
Authors: Mark Andrejevic

Beyond mediation: thinking the computer otherwise
Authors: David J. Gunkel

Sounds like teen spirit: iTunes U, podcasting and a sonic education
Authors: Tara Brabazon

Critical theory 2.0 and im/materiality: the bug in the machinic flows
Authors: Dr Paul A. Taylor

Audience Studies 2.0. On the theory, politics and method of qualitative audience research
Authors: Joke Hermes

Straw men or cyborgs?
Authors: Professor Jonathan Dovey and Emeritus Professor Martin Lister

Media Studies 2.0: a response
Authors: David Gauntlett

Review
Authors: Tero Karppi

Print ISSN: 1757-2681

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