From the Holocaust to 9/11, modern communications systems have incessantly exposed us to reports of distant and horrifying events, experienced by strangers, and brought to us through media technologies. In this book leading scholars explore key questions concerning the truth status and broader implications of 'media witnessing'.

From the Holocaust to 9/11, modern communications systems have incessantly exposed us to reports of distant and horrifying events, experienced by strangers, and brought to us through media technologies. In this book leading scholars explore key questions concerning the truth status and broader implications of 'media witnessing'.

Do mass media turn us all into witnesses, and what might this mean? From the Holocaust to 9/11, modern communications systems have incessantly exposed us to reports of far flung and often horrifying events, experienced by people whom we do not know personally, and mediated by a range of changing technologies. What is the truth status of such 'media witnessing', and how does it depend on journalists and media organizations? What are its social, cultural and political ramifications, and what kind of moral demands can it make of audiences to act on behalf of suffering strangers? What are its connections to historical forms of witnessing in other fields: legal, religious and scientific? And how is it tied to technological transformations in media, transformations that bridge distances in space and time and can make ordinary people the sources of extraordinary footage?
These are the themes taken up within this unique volume, now available for the first time in paperback with a special preface written by Professor Elihu Katz. The contributors are some of the leading contemporary thinkers in Communication and Media Studies, and together they not only make a crucial intervention in on-going debates about media witnessing and the representation of strangers, but present original conceptualizations of the relationship between knowledge, discourse and technology in the era of mass communications.

Media are poetic forces. They produce and reveal worlds, representing them to our senses and connecting them to our lives. While the poetic powers of media are perceptual, symbolic, social and technical, they are also profoundly moral and existential. They matter for how we reflect upon and act in a shared, everyday world of finite human existence. The Poetics of Digital Media explores the poetic work of media in digital culture. Developing an argument through close readings of overlooked or denigrated media objects - screenshots, tagging, selfies and more - the book reveals how media shape the taken-for-granted structures of our lives, and how they disclose our world through sudden moments of visibility and tangibility. Bringing us face to face with the conditions of our existence, it investigates how the 'given' world we inhabit is given through media. This book is important reading for students and scholars of media theory, philosophy of media, visual culture and media aesthetics.

Media are poetic forces. They produce and reveal worlds, representing them to our senses and connecting them to our lives. While the poetic powers of media are perceptual, symbolic, social and technical, they are also profoundly moral and existential. They matter for how we reflect upon and act in a shared, everyday world of finite human existence. The Poetics of Digital Media explores the poetic work of media in digital culture. Developing an argument through close readings of overlooked or denigrated media objects - screenshots, tagging, selfies and more - the book reveals how media shape the taken-for-granted structures of our lives, and how they disclose our world through sudden moments of visibility and tangibility. Bringing us face to face with the conditions of our existence, it investigates how the 'given' world we inhabit is given through media. This book is important reading for students and scholars of media theory, philosophy of media, visual culture and media aesthetics.