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In 1957 Sputnik, the world's first man-made satellite, dazzled people as it zipped around the planet. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than eight thousand satellites orbited the Earth, and satellite practices such as live transmission, direct broadcasting, remote sensing, and astronomical observation had altered how we imagined ourselves in relation to others and our planet within the cosmos. In Cultures in Orbit, Lisa Parks analyzes these satellite practices and shows how they have affected meanings of "the global" and "the televisual." Parks suggests that the convergence of broadcast, satellite, and computer technologies necessitates an expanded definition of "television,...
The contributors to Signal Traffic investigate how the material artifacts of media infrastructure--transoceanic cables, mobile telephone towers, Internet data centers, and the like--intersect with everyday life. Essayists confront the multiple and hybrid forms networks take, the different ways networks are imagined and engaged with by publics around the world, their local effects, and what human beings experience when a network fails. Some contributors explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities orphaned from the knowledge economies, technological literacies, and epistemological questions linked to infrastructural formation and use. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus. Contributors include Charles R. Acland, Paul Dourish, Sarah Harris, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, Shannon Mattern, Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, Christian Sandvig, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, and Helga Tawil-Souri.
Down to Earth presents the first comprehensive overview of the geopolitical maneuvers, financial investments, technological innovations, and ideological struggles that take place behind the scenes of the satellite industry. Satellite projects that have not received extensive coverage—microsatellites in China, WorldSpace in South Africa, SiriusXM, the failures of USA 193 and Cosmos 954, and Iridium—are explored. This collection takes readers on a voyage through a truly global industry, from the sites where satellites are launched to the corporate clean rooms where they are designed, and along the orbits and paths that satellites traverse. Combining a practical introduction to the mechanics of the satellite industry, a history of how its practices and technologies have evolved, and a sophisticated theoretical analysis of satellite cultures, Down to Earth opens up a new space for global media studies.
This volume's contributors offer a new critical language through which to explore and assess the historical, juridical, geopolitical, and cultural dimensions of drone technology and warfare. They show how drones generate particular ways of visualizing the spaces and targets of war while acting as tools to exercise state power. Essays include discussions of the legal justifications of extrajudicial killings and how US drone strikes in the Horn of Africa impact life on the ground, as well as a personal narrative of a former drone operator. The contributors also explore drone warfare in relation to sovereignty, governance, and social difference; provide accounts of the relationships between dro...
Provides an overview of the rapidly changing landscape of global television, combining previously published essays by pioneers of the study of television with new work by cutting-edge television scholars who refine and extend intellectual debates in the field.
DIVCritical studies of the popular television show, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER./div
Critics and defenders alike connect today's widespread anxieties about sexuality and culture to the political activism of the 1960s and the counterculture's preoccupation with the individual pursuit of pleasure/ In contrast, the essays in Swindling Single attribute the new sexual mores of that era not to its political upheavals but to a confluence of social, cultural, and economic factors that encouraged personal gratification and altered traditionally defined gender roles. Contributors analyze a broad range of topics: the commercialization of avant-garde and exploitation films; new visions of female sexuality in That Girl and The Avengers; the social context of such cultural icons as Hugh Hefner and Charles Manson; the intersection of race and sexuality in Eldridge Cleaver's Soul oil Ice; and depictions of sexual pleasure in pornography and scientific films.
The diverse essays collected here constitute an exploration of the emerging interdisciplinary field of visual culture, and examine why modern and postmodern culture place such a premium on rendering experience in visual form.
Explorations of the many ways of being material in the digital age. In his oracular 1995 book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte predicted that social relations, media, and commerce would move from the realm of “atoms to bits”—that human affairs would be increasingly untethered from the material world. And yet in 2019, an age dominated by the digital, we have not quite left the material world behind. In Being Material, artists and technologists explore the relationship of the digital to the material, demonstrating that processes that seem wholly immaterial function within material constraints. Digital technologies themselves, they remind us, are material things—constituted by atoms o...
In a society that awaits 'the new' in every medium, what happens to last year's new? From player pianos to vinyl records, and from the typewriter to the telephone, 'Residual Media' is an innovative approach to the aging of culture and reveals that, ultimately, new cultural phenomena rely on encounters with the old.