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Reckoning with Social Media
Once celebrated for connecting people and circulating ideas, social media are facing mounting criticisms about their anticompetitive reach, addictive design, and toxicity to democracy. Known cumulatively as the “techlash,” journalists, users, and politicians are asking social media platforms to account for being too big, too engaging, and too unruly. In the age of the techlash, strategies to regulate how platforms operate technically, economically, and legally, are often stacked against individual tactics to manage the effects of social media by disconnecting from them. These disconnection practices—from restricting screen time and detoxing from device use to deleting apps and accounts...
Populism and Conspiracy Theory
This book explores the close connections between populism and conspiracy theory. Populism and Conspiracy Theory contributes to filling the gap in the research in this area. The individual contributions in Part I provide in-depth analyses of specific configurations of populism and conspiracy theory. Part II includes nuanced considerations of more theoretical issues. The case studies cover both right-wing and left-wing manifestations of populism, while highlighting that populist movements often cut across the traditional left-right divide. Chapters focus on the twenty-first century and the first half of the twentieth century, as well as the impact of history and memory on contemporary discours...
How to Queer the World
What video games teach us about building a better world What does it mean to build a world? Worldbuilding is traditionally understood as an expression of storytelling across media forms. Yet, as video games show us, worldbuilding does not necessarily need to center narrative elements. Instead, new worlds can allow us to reimagine existing structures, conventions, and constants. Doing so gives us the tools to queer the world around us. How to Queer the World argues that video games provide us with keen insight into worldbuilding. With these insights come a new understanding of the ever-elusive ideals of queer worldmaking. Video games challenge us to address how worlds are built through underl...
Who Got the Camera?
Reality first appeared in the late 1980s—in the sense not of real life but rather of the TV entertainment genre inaugurated by shows such as Cops and America’s Most Wanted; the daytime gabfests of Geraldo, Oprah, and Donahue; and the tabloid news of A Current Affair. In a bracing work of cultural criticism, Eric Harvey argues that reality TV emerged in dialog with another kind of entertainment that served as its foil while borrowing its techniques: gangsta rap. Or, as legendary performers Ice Cube and Ice-T called it, “reality rap.” Reality rap and reality TV were components of a cultural revolution that redefined popular entertainment as a truth-telling medium. Reality entertainment...
Healthy Users
We are often told that social media well-being is simply the result of individual users making healthy digital choices. All it takes is a little self-discipline. In this book, Niall Docherty looks closely at this belief and exposes the complex relations of power expressed through its articulation and enactment. Docherty creatively and empirically shows how the discourses, designs, and habits of online well-being push user conduct in certain directions, at the expense of others. This is a contingent mode of governance that combines logics of neoliberalism, practices of psychologized person-making, and persuasive capitalist interfaces. By highlighting the damaging effects of this current arrangement, Healthy Users charts a path that will change how we understand and study social media well-being in the future.
The Screens of Virtual Production
This book is the first dedicated edited collection that explores the virtualisation of screen-making processes from pre-production to post-production, while attuning to the aesthetic, ideological and performative contexts upended by these integrated technologies. This book explores what is real in virtual production, as a provocative one, implicitly drawing on the philosophies of the moving image and the recent work on new forms of post-human perceptual realism. This edited collection is divided into the following four themed sections. Section One, It’s Always Been Real: Contemporising Virtual Production, addresses the histories of film realism in relationship to visual technologies, provi...
Forests and Fences
This book examines critical themes in environmental studies though theatre and performance studies. It experiments with forms along with the practice of praxis to provide radical frameworks for resilience in the contemporary age of crisis. Drawing on Ravi Sundaram’s concept of “Wild Zones”, it explores the kinetic overflows in informal sites, but also in the intimate spaces that have been realigned or shocked or fenced in, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of theatre and performance studies, environment and sustainability, and environmental humanities.
Media Materialities
Provides new perspectives on the increasingly complex relationships between media forms and formats, materiality, and meaning. Drawing on a range of qualitative methodologies, our consideration of the materiality of media is structured around three overarching concepts: form – the physical qualities of objects and the meanings which extend from them; format – objects considered in relation to the protocols which govern their use, and the meanings and practices which stem from them; and ephemeral meaning – the ways in which media artefacts are captured, transformed, and redefined through changing social, cultural, and technological values. Each section includes empirical chapters which ...
Enacting Platforms
An analysis of the game engine Unreal through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, as well as a critique of the platform studies framework itself. In this first scholarly book on the Unreal game engine, James Malazita explores one of the major contemporary game development platforms through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, revealing how Unreal produces, and is produced by, broader intersections of power. Enacting Platforms takes a novel critical platform studies approach, raising deeper questions: what are the material and cultural limits of platforms themselves? What is the relationship between the analyst and the platform of study, and how ...
Overcoming the Exploitation of Passion in Videogame Labor
Overcoming the Exploitation of Passion in Videogame Labor: Playing with Passion examines the intersection of passion, precarity, and collocation to pinpoint where and how interventions can be made towards better working conditions. Jackson contends that videogames and passion are inextricably linked and explores this intrinsic link where passion is expected and valorized, be it in the context of play, work, or culture. Passion, Jackson argues, is the connective tissue that sews together the shared experiences that people all over the world will undertake through videogames, including winning close matches, experiencing new worlds, and forging new friendships. This book interrogates the outco...
