We live in a moment of high anxiety around digital transformation. Computers are blamed for generating toxic forms of culture and ways of life. Once part of future imaginaries that were optimistic or even utopian, today there is a sense that things have turned out very differently. Anti-computing is widespread. This book seeks to understand its cultural and material logics, its forms, and its operations. Anti-Computing critically investigates forgotten histories of dissent - moments when the imposition of computational technologies, logics, techniques, imaginaries, utopias have been questioned, disputed, or refused. It asks why dissent is forgotten and how - under what circumstances - it revives. Constituting an engagement with media archaeology/medium theory and working through a series of case studies, this book is compelling reading for scholars in digital media, literary, cultural history, digital humanities and associated fields at all levels. -- .

The arc and the machine is a timely and original defence of narrative in an age of information. Stressing interpretation and experience alongside affect and sensation it convincingly argues that narrative is key to contemporary forms of cultural production and to the practice of contemporary life. Re-appraising the prospects for narrative in the digital age, it insists on the centrality of narrative to informational culture and provokes a critical re-appraisal of how innovations in information technology as a material cultural form can be understood and assessed. The book offers a careful exploration of narrative theory, a sophisticated critique of techno-cultural writing and a series of tightly focused case studies. All of which point the way to a restoration of a critical - rather than celebratory - approach to new media. The scope and range of this book is broad, its argumentation careful and exacting, and its conclusions exciting. -- .

Editors Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson present an authoritative collection of essays on the continuing debates over medium specificity and the politics of the digital arts. Comparing the term “transmedia” with “transnational,” they show that the movement beyond specific media or nations does not invalidate those entities but makes us look more closely at the cultural specificity of each combination. In two parts, the book stages debates across essays, creating dialogues that give different narrative accounts of what is historically and ideologically at stake in medium specificity and digital politics. Each part includes a substantive introduction by one of the editors. Part 1 examines precursors, contemporary theorists, and artists who are protagonists in this discursive drama, focusing on how the transmedia frictions and continuities between old and new forms can be read most productively: N. Katherine Hayles and Lev Manovich redefine medium specificity, Edward Branigan and Yuri Tsivian explore nondigital precursors, Steve Anderson and Stephen Mamber assess contemporary archival histories, and Grahame Weinbren and Caroline Bassett defend the open-ended mobility of newly emergent media. In part 2, trios of essays address various ideologies of the digital: John Hess and Patricia R. Zimmerman, Herman Gray, and David Wade Crane redraw contours of race, space, and the margins; Eric Gordon, Cristina Venegas, and John T. Caldwell unearth database cities, portable homelands, and virtual fieldwork; and Mark B.N. Hansen, Holly Willis, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Guillermo Gómez-Peña examine interactive bodies transformed by shock, gender, and color. An invaluable reference work in the field of visual media studies, Transmedia Frictions provides sound historical perspective on the social and political aspects of the interactive digital arts, demonstrating that they are never neutral or innocent.

As digital transformations continue to accelerate in the world, discourses of big data have come to dominate in a number of fields, from politics and economics, to media and education. But how can we really understand the digital world when so much of the writing through which we grapple with it remains deeply problematic? In a compelling new work of feminist critical theory, Bassett, Kember and O'Riordan scrutinise many of the assumptions of a masculinist digital world, highlighting the tendency of digital humanities scholarship to venerate and essentialise technical forms, and to adopt gendered writing and citation practices. Contesting these writings, practices and politics, the authors foreground feminist traditions and contributions to the field, offering alternative modes of knowledge production, and a radically different, poetic writing style. Through this prism, Furious brings into focus themes including the automation of home and domestic work, the Anthropocene, and intersectional feminist technofutures.

As digital transformations continue to accelerate in the world, discourses of big data have come to dominate in a number of fields, from politics and economics, to media and education. But how can we really understand the digital world when so much of the writing through which we grapple with it remains deeply problematic? In a compelling new work of feminist critical theory, Bassett, Kember and O'Riordan scrutinise many of the assumptions of a masculinist digital world, highlighting the tendency of digital humanities scholarship to venerate and essentialise technical forms, and to adopt gendered writing and citation practices. Contesting these writings, practices and politics, the authors foreground feminist traditions and contributions to the field, offering alternative modes of knowledge production, and a radically different, poetic writing style. Through this prism, Furious brings into focus themes including the automation of home and domestic work, the Anthropocene, and intersectional feminist technofutures.

Editors Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson present an authoritative collection of essays on the continuing debates over medium specificity and the politics of the digital arts. Comparing the term "transmedia" with "transnational," they show that the movement beyond specific media or nations does not invalidate those entities but makes us look more closely at the cultural specificity of each combination. In two parts, the book stages debates across essays, creating dialogues that give different narrative accounts of what is historically and ideologically at stake in medium specificity and digital politics. Each part includes a substantive introduction by one of the editors.
Part 1 examines precursors, contemporary theorists, and artists who are protagonists in this discursive drama, focusing on how the transmedia frictions and continuities between old and new forms can be read most productively: N. Katherine Hayles and Lev Manovich redefine medium specificity, Edward Branigan and Yuri Tsivian explore nondigital precursors, Steve Anderson and Stephen Mamber assess contemporary archival histories, and Grahame Weinbren and Caroline Bassett defend the open-ended mobility of newly emergent media.
In part 2, trios of essays address various ideologies of the digital: John Hess and Patricia R. Zimmerman, Herman Gray, and David Wade Crane redraw contours of race, space, and the margins; Eric Gordon, Cristina Venegas, and John T. Caldwell unearth database cities, portable homelands, and virtual fieldwork; and Mark B.N. Hansen, Holly Willis, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Guillermo Gomez-Pena examine interactive bodies transformed by shock, gender, and color.
An invaluable reference work in the field of visual media studies, "Transmedia Frictions" provides sound historical perspective on the social and political aspects of the interactive digital arts, demonstrating that they are never neutral or innocent.

The Arc and the machine is a timely and original defence of narrative in an age of information. Stressing interpretation and experience alongside affect and sensation it convincingly argues that narrative is key to contemporary forms of cultural production and to the practice of contemporary life. Re-appraising the prospects for narrative in the digital age, it insists on the centrality of narrative to informational culture and provokes a critical re-appraisal of how innovations in information technology as a material cultural form can be understood and assessed. The book offers a careful exploration of narrative theory, a sophisticated critique of techno-cultural writing, and a series of tightly focused case studies. All of which point the way to a restoration of a critical - rather than celebratory approaches - to new media. The scope and range of this book is broad, its argumentation careful and exacting, and its conclusions exciting. -- .

Media Studies: A Reader introduces a full range of theoretical perspectives through which the media may be explored, analysed, critiqued, and understood. The Reader reaches back to essential statements from writers such as Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Marshall McLuhan, Jurgen Habermas, Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault, whose work was central to forming the field. It also includes wide ranging work on contemporary media formations from a stellar collection of diverse theorists, including Annabelle Sreberny, Paul Gilroy, Charlotte Brunsden, Angela McRobbie, Asu Askoy and Kevin Robins, Micheal Bull, and Nick Couldry, to name only a very few of those included. Finally, the Reader looks to the future, exploring new media formations and their significance, through the work of Mark Andrejevic, Lev Manovich, Jonathan Sterne and others. The sixty-five readings are divided into two main parts: 'Studying the Media' begins with a section on key theoretical perspectives and follows this with five sections opening up questions around the Public Sphere, Representation, Feminism and Gender, Audiences, and Everyday Life respectively. The second part, 'Case Studies', brings together concrete examples of how theoretical approaches can be realised through a series of case studies, covering for instance, reality TV, news, advertising, and new media. With easy-to-follow introductions and guides to further reading accompanying each section, Media Studies: A Reader equips the student to engage with key debates in the field. This new edition updates all sections with a rich selection of contemporary writing complementing re-chosen media 'classics'. In addition: * Further Reading lists have been comprehensively updated * Introductory essays to each section have been expanded and re-written