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The Connectivity of Things
A media history of the material and infrastructural features of networking practices, a German classic translated for the first time into English. Nets hold, connect, and catch. They ensnare, bind, and entangle. Our social networks owe their name to a conceivably strange and ambivalent object. But how did the net get into the network? And how can it reasonably represent the connectedness of people, things, institutions, signs, infrastructures, and even nature? The Connectivity of Things by Sebastian Giessmann, the first media history that addresses the overwhelming diversity of networks, attempts to answer all these questions and more. Reconstructing the decisive moments in which networking ...
Bad Boys and Wicked Women
This volume assembles 13 essays as the result of a workshop for international doctoral and post-doctoral researchers in Old Norse studies, which was held at the Institute for Nordic Philology at LMU in Munich in December 2015. The contributions’ focus lies on different aspects of ›bad‹ or ›evil‹ characters in saga literature, and they give testimony to the broad literary variety such figures display in Old Norse texts. The “Antagonists and Troublemakers in Old Norse Literature” are here explored in their diversity, ranging from their literary psychology to their characteristics which often challenge gender norms. The contributions discuss the narrative strategies of presenting these characters to the audience, both positively and negatively. Furthermore, they analyse how the central paradox of evil and its dependence on context is realised in various ways in Old Norse literature.
The Server
A cutting‑edge media history on a perennially fascinating topic, which attempts to answer the crucial question: Who is in charge, the servant or the master? Though classic servants like the butler or the governess have largely vanished, the Internet is filled with servers: web, ftp, mail, and others perform their daily drudgery, going about their business noiselessly and unnoticed. Why then are current‑day digital drudges called servers? Markus Krajewski explores this question by going from the present back to the Baroque to study historical aspects of service through various perspectives, be it the servants' relationship to architecture or their function in literary or scientific contexts. At the intersection of media studies, cultural history, and literature, this work recounts the gradual transition of agency from human to nonhuman actors to show how the concept of the digital server stems from the classic role of the servant.
Comics and Agency
This volume aims to intensify the interdisciplinary dialogue on comics and related popular multimodal forms (including manga, graphic novels, and cartoons) by focusing on the concept of medial, mediated, and mediating agency. To this end, a theoretically and methodologically diverse set of contributions explores the interrelations between individual, collective, and institutional actors within historical and contemporary comics cultures. Agency is at stake when recipients resist hegemonic readings of multimodal texts. In the same manner, “authorship” can be understood as the attribution of agency of and between various medial instances and roles such as writers, artists, colorists, letterers, or editors, as well as with regard to commercial rights holders such as publishing houses or conglomerates and reviewers or fans. From this perspective, aspects of comics production (authorship and institutionalization) can be related to aspects of comics reception (appropriation and discursivation), and circulation (participation and canonization), including their potential for transmedialization and making contributions to the formation of the public sphere.
Medialities
Cultural, social and economic production is always medially constituted, since it is formed through processing, storage and transmission of certain data or materials. This is why the concept of mediality can be used to stress the performative character of all culture, whose multiplicity of techniques conversely interacts with the mediality in question. The contributors focus on a given cultural medium's genuine structure as a particular deployment without falling into some kind of hardware determinism, therefore considering culture beyond textuality.
Guides of the Atlas
How do digital media technologies shape or restructure social practice? And which transitions and demarcations of different forms of publicness arise in this context? Simon Holdermann examines this question in his ethnography of everyday life in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. In order to approach the ongoing, historically situated social transformations of the region, he analyses a variety of media practices concerning the organizational work and transnational cooperation that take place there - in particular at the intersection of mountain tourism, NGO work, and local self-government.
An Edgy Realism
Similar to the way in which the new waves of the 1960s and 1970s had been characterized by new forms of cinematic realism, cinema since the turn of the millennium has pointed into the direction of a new, edgy realism. Art film movements such as Dogma 95 and the New French Extremity, as well as shaky-cam horror films like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, provide evidence of the fact that the proliferation of the digital since the 1990s has profoundly changed not only contemporary media culture and the social role of film, as seen, for example, in the case of amateur film and the phenomenon of mobile reporting and its distribution via YouTube and the like, but also notions of r...
The 'New' Documentary Nexus
In the last ten years, the field of documentary has been subject to substantial paradigm shifts due to the rise of digital media practices. This publication explores some central questions arising in this context: Who are the different interactors networking within the ‘new’ documentary nexus? How can we conceptualize interactive documentary practices as encounters and dynamic interactions within digital media culture and beyond? How can one methodologically approach this complex networked yet dynamic nexus in its constant flux? Developing a coherent and expandable operational set of methods to describe and analyse paradigmatic cases, this book addresses documentary theorists, (new) media scholars and students of media and communication studies who want to gain a survey of current developments in the field of interactive documentary practices.
Connect and Divide
Media divide and connect simultaneously: they act as intermediaries between otherwise disconnected entities, and as a 'middle' that mediates, but also shields different entities from each other. This ambiguity gives rise to conflicting interpretations, and it evokes all those figures that give a first clue about this janus-faced relationship of 'connect and divide': gate-keeper, parasite, amongst others. If we give accounts of media before and after their mediated action, we refer to persons and organizations, automatisms and artifacts, signals and inscriptions, and we seem to find it easy to refer to their distinct potentials and dis/abilities. But within the interaction? the 'middle' of me...
Digital Culture & Society (DCS)
Modern mundane life is brimming with a variety of data-driven technologies that are supposed to augment the practices they are involved in. As humans bring these technologies into their lives in a process of domestication, they tame them and are simultaneously influenced by their presence. In combining domestication research and an empirical analysis of current, digital, and interconnected media, this issue examines the process of taming with an emphasis on practices. The contributions in this issue explore the use of digitally connected media such as vacuum robots, smart speakers, drones, and kitchen appliances with reference to the domestication paradigm from interdisciplinary perspectives including media studies, sociology, anthropology, and human-computer interaction.
