Exploring how we make, distribute, and consume today’s media systemsMedia backends--the electronics, labor, and operations behind our screens--significantly influence our understanding of the sociotechnical relations, economies, and operations of media. Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova, and Sander De Ridder assemble essays that delve into the evolving politics of the media infrastructural landscape. Throughout, the contributors draw on feminist, queer, and intersectional ...

Media and Everyday Life offers an accessible overview for students of media, communication and cultural studies looking to explore how modern-day media practices impact on the experience of everyday life, making this the essential companion to introductory media studies courses.This innovative introduction to media studies challenges conventional accounts of what media do to people – focusing instead on what people do with media in the course of everyday life. By rejecting...

Conventional wisdom suggests that the pervasiveness of digital media into our everyday lives is undermining cherished notions of politics and ethics. Is this concern unfounded?In this daring new book, Tim Markham argues that what it means to live ethically and politically is realized through, not in spite of, the everyday experience of digital life. Drawing on a wide range of philosophers from Hegel and Heidegger to Levinas and Butler, he investigates what is really at sta...

For centuries scholars have fretted about the gulf that exists between the enormity of historical change and the banality of people’s everyday lives. This is said to be exacerbated in our media saturated age, immersed as we have become in an endless stream of sensations and distractions. In response, media theorists and practitioners alike try to come up with new ways of breaking through people’s complacency and waking them up to the reality or what’s going on out there. Drawing on both ph...

Phenomenology has become one of the most important philosophical traditions underpinning recent theory and research on new media, whether or not the word is used explicitly. Conditions of Mediation brings together, for the first time in a single publication, the diversity of phenomenological media research—from social platforms and wearable media to diasporic identity formation and the ethics of consumer technologies.The new orthodoxy in media studies emphasizes the experi...

The politics of war reporting: Authority, authenticity and morality challenges the assumptions that reporters and their audiences have about the way the journalistic trade operates and how it sees the world. It unpacks the taken-for-granted aspects of the lives of war correspondents, exposing the principles of interaction and valorisation that usually go unacknowledged. Is journalistic authority really only about doing the job well? Do the ethics of war reporting emerge simply from the ‘st...

WINNER of the 2015 ICA Outstanding Book AwardThis path-breaking book explores how solidarity towards vulnerable others is performed in our media environment. It argues that stories where famine is described through our own experience of dieting or or where solidarity with Africa translates into wearing a cool armband tell us about much more than the cause that they attempt to communicate. They tell us something about the ways in which we imagine the world outside o...

Roger Silverstone's compelling new book places the global media at the heart of the moral future of civilisation. It argues that the media (the press, broadcasting, the Internet and increasingly peer-to-peer technologies and networks) have a profound significance for the way in which the world is understood by its citizens. It also argues that without a clear understanding of that significance, and without a critique of the way in which the media go about their daily business, we are likel...

Foucault - The Key Ideas is a concise introduction to the life, works and ideas of this ground-breaking modern philosopher. This book will not only guide you through the events of Foucault's life and help you to understand his most complex ideas with ease; it will also demonstrate the practical impact of those ideas on life today. Covering everything from Foucault's views on the philosophy and sociology of knowledge to his analysis of power and institutions in society, this book offers a f...

Student Essentials: Critical Thinking – in one hour helps you master the essentials of this core study skill in just 60 minutes. If you are studying for an undergraduate degree at university, critical thinking and analysis is imperative when studying and can often be the difference between an acceptable grade and a great grade. This book will help you develop the key essentials of this crucial skill in just one hour so you can successfully apply it to your studies straight away.

Stanley R. Barrett's Anthropology has long been a premiere sourcebook for students, providing a comprehensive overview of both theory and method in the discipline. In this updated second edition, Barrett's discussion of the origins and evolution of anthropology remains, augmented by sections addressing recent changes and ongoing questions in the field.The second edition of Anthropology adds important new material on questions of culture versus power, Max Weber's t...

Vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the assumption that vulnerability requires protection and the strengthening of paternalistic power at the expense of collective resistance. Focusing on political movements and cultural practices in different global locations, including Turkey, Palestine, France, and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors to Vulnerability in Resistance articulate an understanding of the role of vulnerability in practices of resis...