Media - old or new, in the cloud or underground - constitutes the very condition in which our world takes shape. Media is reshaped continuously, marked for both the profound effects it produces and the acceleration it exhibits. It is the site in which we signal some of the most pressing issues we face in our ever-widening technologized world. Written by authors working at the forefront of media theory today, this book charts an original and compelling path across various media forms, bringing to light the wonderful yet persistently unsettling role that media plays, and will continue to play, in the making of our future. It not only establishes media as a serious and interdisciplinary concept, but also demonstrates how this concept can be developed beyond the current limited form and content dichotomy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

Media - old or new, in the cloud or underground - constitutes the very condition in which our world takes shape. Media is reshaped continuously, marked for both the profound effects it produces and the acceleration it exhibits. It is the site in which we signal some of the most pressing issues we face in our ever-widening technologized world. Written by authors working at the forefront of media theory today, this book charts an original and compelling path across various media forms, bringing to light the wonderful yet persistently unsettling role that media plays, and will continue to play, in the making of our future. It not only establishes media as a serious and interdisciplinary concept, but also demonstrates how this concept can be developed beyond the current limited form and content dichotomy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

How are human actions shaped by the materiality of media? Contemporary media leads us more than ever to an 'acting at a distance,' an acting entangled with the materiality of communication and the mediality of transmission. This book explores this crucial phenomenon thereby introducing urgent questions of human interaction, the binding and breaking of time and space, and the entanglement of the material and the immaterial. Three vivid inquiries deal with histories and theories of mediality and materiality: John Durham Peters looks at episodes of simultaneity and synchronization. Christina Vagt discusses the agency of computer models against the backdrop of aesthetic theories by Henri Bergson and Hans Blumenberg, and Florian Sprenger discusses early electrical transmissions through copper wire and the temporality of instantaneity.