Communication and Control: Tools, Systems, and New Dimensions advocates a systems view of human communication in a time of intelligent, learning machines. This edited collection sheds new light on things as mundane yet still profoundly consequential (and seemingly "low-tech") as push buttons, pagers, and telemarketing systems. Contributors also investigate aspects of "remote control" related to education, organizational design, artificial intelligence, cyberwarfare, drones, and even binge-watching on Netflix. In line with a systems view, the collection takes up a media ecological view. This work will be of interest to students, scholars, and researchers in communication, new media, and technology.

This edited collection analyzes the role of digital technology in contemporary society dialectically. While many authors, journalists, and commentators have argued that the internet and digital technologies will bring us democracy, equality, and freedom, digital culture often results in loss of privacy, misinformation, and exploitation. This collection challenges celebratory readings of digital technology by suggesting digital culture's potential is limited because of its fundamental relationship to oppressive social forces. The Dialectic of Digital Culture explores ways the digital realm challenges and reproduces power. The contributors provide innovative case studies of various phenomenon including #metoo, Etsy, mommy blogs, music streaming, sustainability, and net neutrality to reveal the reproduction of neoliberal cultural logics. In seemingly transformative digital spaces, these essays provide dialectical readings that challenge dominant narratives about technology and study specific aspects of digital culture that are often under explored.

This edited collection analyzes the role of digital technology in contemporary society dialectically. While many authors, journalists, and commentators have argued that the internet and digital technologies will bring us democracy, equality, and freedom, digital culture often results in loss of privacy, misinformation, and exploitation. This collection challenges celebratory readings of digital technology by suggesting digital culture's potential is limited because of its fundamental relationship to oppressive social forces. The Dialectic of Digital Culture explores ways the digital realm challenges and reproduces power. The contributors provide innovative case studies of various phenomenon including #metoo, Etsy, mommy blogs, music streaming, sustainability, and net neutrality to reveal the reproduction of neoliberal cultural logics. In seemingly transformative digital spaces, these essays provide dialectical readings that challenge dominant narratives about technology and study specific aspects of digital culture that are often under explored. Check out the blog for more: http://blog.uta.edu/digitaldialectic

In our digital media saturated lives, where we spend increasing amounts of time in "virtual worlds" such as Second Life or online on blogs and video sites, it can be easy to forget about public spaces. Unlike content in virtual worlds, cultural programs in public spaces are events that are lived and experienced bodily and sensuously. Museum exhibits, public music performances, sports, art festivals - these events and spaces are truly immediate, which is to say that they are lived bodily by those that participate in and produce them. While media might be involved, these phenomena are wholly different from broadcast mass media objects. This book, The Politics of Cultural Programming in Public Spaces, interrogates these events and spaces in order to discover - and recover - the ways in which they affect subjectivity. We offer this not in lieu of interrogations of our heavily mediated world, but as a reminder that public spaces and public events still matter to millions of people worldwide. To this end, this collection groups together two seemingly different objects: events and institutions. Cultural events, such as festivals, protests, and concerts, are often considered one-time phenomena. Even events that are annual are seen as relegated to a brief period of time. Institutions, such as museums, are seen as more permanent, even timeless. Yet both are caught in complex political and economic webs, and both mutate through time as various constituencies struggle over their uses and meanings. Short-term events persist in cultural memory through news reports, eyewitness accounts, and documentaries. Museums and exhibits, for all their persistence, often undergo turnover in personnel and subsequently are sites of shifting political and cultural mores. Moreover, since this book deals with cultural programming in public spaces, all of the objects considered here are seen as intimately tied to heterogeneous geographical/political spaces. Seen in this light, the distinction between, say a book festival and a sculpture garden, is more arbitrary than helpful. In the final analysis, no object is free of the web of determinations, and the essays in the book explore the ramifications of this fact.