Choice Outstanding TitleWhether you’re purchasing groceries with your Safeway “club card” or casting a vote on American Idol, that data is being collected. From Amazon to iTunes, cell phones to GPS devices, Google to TiVo—all of these products and services give us an expansive sense of choice, access, and participation. But, in an era now marked by large-scale NSA operations that secretly monitor our email exchanges and internet surfing, Mark Andrejevic shows how t...

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 ...

Today, more mediated information is available to more people than at any other time in human history. New and revitalized sense-making strategies multiply in response to the challenges of "cutting through the clutter" of competing narratives and taming the avalanche of information. Data miners, "sentiment analysts," and decision markets offer to help bodies of data "speak for themselves"—making sense of their own patterns so we don’t have to. Neuromarketers and body language experts promis...

In this era of pervasive automation, Mark Andrejevic provides an original framework for tracing the logical trajectory of automated media and their social, political, and cultural consequences.This book explores the cascading logic of automation, which develops from the information collection process through to data processing and, finally, automated decision making. It argues that pervasive digital monitoring combines with algorithmic decision making and machine learning to create...

This book intervenes in discussions of the fate of nationalism and national identity by exploring the relationship between state appropriation of marketing and branding strategies on the one hand, and, on the other, the commercial mobilization of nationalist discourses.

Cultural studies face a complicated yet rich future, proving both flexible and resilient in many countries. Against this backdrop, this book offers a fresh perspective on the state of the field of cultural studies, via an evaluation of the work of one of its key thinkers – Graeme Turner – and the traditions of Australian cultural studies which have been influential on the formation of the field.Thinking with Turner, and being informed by his practice, can help orient us in the face...

Drawing on cultural theory and interviews with fans, cast members and producers, this book places the reality TV trend within a broader social context, tracing its relationship to the development of a digitally enhanced, surveillance-based interactive economy and to a savvy mistrust of mediated reality in general. Surveying several successful reality TV formats, the book links the rehabilitation of 'Big Brother' to the increasingly important economic role played by the work of being watche...

"An intelligent book that struggles honestly with important questions: Is the net turning us into passive knowers? Is it degrading our ability to reason? What can we do about this?" —David Weinberger, Los Angeles Review of BooksWe used to say "seeing is believing"; now, googling is believing. With 24/7 access to nearly all of the world’s information at our fingertips, we no longer trek to the library or the encyclopedia shelf in search of answers. We just ...

The Ethics of Emerging Media engages with enduring ethical questions while addressing critical questions concerning ethical boundaries at the forefront of new media development. This collection provides a rare opportunity to ask how emerging media affect the ethical choices in our lives and the lives of people across the globe.Centering on different new media forms from eBay to Wikipedia, each chapter raises questions about how changing media for...

Media and Society: A Critical Perspective offers an accessible introduction to the role that the mass media play in our lives, our society, and American culture. Berger explores the relationship between consumers and media with an emphasis on the shaping influence that both have on each other. This lively text, illustrated with original sketches by the author, equips students with the tools necessary to analyze the media that permeates their lives. The third edition features a discussion o...

Travelling through theories of emotion and affect, this book addresses the key ways in which media studies can be brought to bear upon everyday encounters with online cultures and practices. The book takes stock of where we are emotionally with regard to the Internet in the context of other screen media.

The co-author of the internationally bestselling The Rebel Sell brings us "slow politics": promoting slow thought, slow deliberation and slow debate.Over the last twenty years, the political systems of the western world have become increasingly divided--not between right and left but between crazy and non-crazy. Whats more, the crazies seem to be gaining the upper hand. Rational thought cannot prevail in the current social and media environment, where ele...