In Necromedia, media activist Marcel O'Gorman takes aim at "the collusion of death and technology," drawing on a broad arsenal that ranges from posthumanist philosophy and social psychology to digital art and handmade "objects-to-think-with." Throughout, O'Gorman mixes philosophical speculation with artistic creation, personal memoir, and existential dread. He is not so much arguing against technoculture as documenting a struggle to embrace the technical essence of human being without permitting technology worshippers to have the last word on what it means to be human. Inspired in part by the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, O'Gorman begins by suggesting that technology provides human beings with a cultural hero system built on the denial of death and a false promise of immortality. This theory adds an existential zest to the book, allowing the author not only to devise a creative diagnosis of what Bernard Stiegler has called the malaise of contemporary technoculture but also to contribute a potential therapy-one that requires embracing human finitude, infusing care into the process of technological production, and recognizing the vulnerability of all things, human and nonhuman. With this goal in mind, Necromedia prescribes new research practices in the humanities that involve both written work and the creation of objects-to-think-with that are designed to infiltrate and shape the technoculture that surrounds us.

The essays in NEW MEDIA/NEW METHODS: THE ACADEMIC TURN FROM LITERACY TO ELECTRACY pose an invention-based approach to new media studies. Representing a specific school of theory emergent in graduates of the University of Florida and working from the concept of electracy, as opposed to literacy, contributors present various heuristics for elaborating new media rhetoric and theory. NEW MEDIA/NEW METHODS challenges literacy-based understandings of new media, which typically pose such work as hermeneutics or textual interpretation. Rather than grounding their work in hermeneutics, contributors rely on heuretics, or invention, to outline new modes of scholarly discourse reflective of and adapted to digital culture. Contributors include Ron Broglio, Elizabeth Coffman, Denise K. Cummings, Bradley Dilger, Michelle Glaros, Michael Jarrett, Barry Jason Mauer, Marcel O'Gorman, Robert Ray, Jeff Rice, Craig Saper, and Gregory L. Ulmer. ABOUT THE EDITORS JEFF RICE is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Campus Writing Program, at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the author of THE RHETORIC OF COOL: COMPOSITION STUDIES AND NEW MEDIA (Southern Illinois University Press, 2007) and the textbook Writing ABOUT COOL: HYPERTEXT AND CULTURAL STUDIES IN THE COMPUTER CLASSROOM (Longman) as well as numerous essays on new media and writing. He blogs at Yellow Dog (http: //www.ydog.net). MARCEL O'GORMAN is Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo and Director of the Critical Media Lab. His published research, including E-CRIT: DIGITAL MEDIA, CRITICAL THEORY AND THE HUMANITIES (University of Toronto Press, 2006), is concerned primarily with the fate of the humanities in a digital culture. O'Gorman is also a practicing artist, working primarily with physical computing inventions and architectural installations.