Streaming Music examines how the Internet has become integrated in contemporary music use, by focusing on streaming as a practice and a technology for music consumption. The backdrop to this enquiry is the digitization of society and culture, where the music industry has undergone profound disruptions, and where music streaming has altered listening modes and meanings of music in everyday life.The objective of Streaming Music is to shed light on what these transfo...

When Mia moves to the idyllic suburbs on the outskirts of the city, an opportunity arises to start a new chapter in life. Mia, in her mid-30s with an academic background, isn’t the most assertive—she’s more on the cautious side—but her career has been successful, and she lives with a man she believes she loves.Everything should be fine, yet she sometimes feels trapped in a box that’s too small, as though she’s not fully utilizing her potential. She hopes the move to this suburban i...

Facebook and Philosophy is an entertaining, multi-faceted exploration of what Facebook means for us and for our relationships. With discussions ranging from the nature of friendship and its relationship to "friending," to the (debatable) efficacy of "online activism," this book is the most extensive and systematic attempt to understand Facebook yet. And with plenty of new perspectives on Twitter and Web 2.0 along the way, this fun, thought-provoking book is a serious and significa...

In Always On, Naomi S. Baron reveals that online and mobile technologies--including instant messaging, cell phones, multitasking, Facebook, blogs, and wikis--are profoundly influencing how we read and write, speak and listen, but not in the ways we might suppose. Baron draws on a decade of research to provide an eye-opening look at language in an online and mobile world. She reveals for instance that email, IM, and text messaging have had surprisingly little impact on student writ...

An anonymous musician plays Pachelbel's Canon on the electric guitar in a clip that has been viewed over sixty million times. The Dramatic Gopher is viewed over sixteen million times, as is a severely inebriated David Hasselhoff attempting to eat a hamburger. Over 800 variations, parodies, and parodies-of-parodies are uploaded of Beyonce Knowles' Single Ladies dance. Tay Zonday sings Chocolate Rain in a video viewed almost forty million times and scores himself a record deal. Obama Girl en...

MP3: The Meaning of a Format recounts the hundred-year history of the world's most common format for recorded audio. Understanding the historical meaning of the MP3 format entails rethinking the place of digital technologies in the larger universe of twentieth-century communication history, from hearing research conducted by the telephone industry in the 1910s, through the mid-century development of perceptual coding (the technology underlying the MP3), to the format's promiscuous...

The renowned cultural theorist and media designer Anne Balsamo maintains that technology and culture are inseparable; those who engage in technological innovation are designing the cultures of the future. Designing Culture is a call for taking culture seriously in the design and development of innovative technologies. Balsamo contends that the wellspring of technological innovation is the technological imagination, a quality of mind that enables people to think with technology, to...

Filling The Void is a book about how the cultures and psychology of social media use fit within a broader landscape of life under capitalism. It argues that social media use is often a psychological response to the need for pleasure and comfort that results from the stresses of life under postmodern capitalism, rather than being a driver of new behaviours as newer technologies are often said to be. Both the explosive growth of social media and the corresponding reconfiguration of the web f...

With over 500 million users worldwide, Microsoft's PowerPoint software has become the ubiquitous tool for nearly all forms of public presentation—in schools, government agencies, the military, and, of course, offices everywhere. In this revealing and powerfully argued book, author Franck Frommer shows us that PowerPoint's celebrated ease and efficiency actually mask a profoundly disturbing but little-understood transformation in human communication.Using fascinating examples (inclu...

Assuming no knowledge of linguistics, Understanding Digital Literacies provides an accessible and timely introduction to new media literacies. It supplies readers with the theoretical and analytical tools with which to explore the linguistic and social impact of a host of new digital literacy practices. Each chapter in the volume covers a different topic, presenting an overview of the major concepts, issues, problems and debates surrounding the topic, while also encouraging studen...

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...

As evidenced by the clientele in any urban coffee shop, devices such as cell phones, BlackBerries, and Wi-Fi-enabled laptops have proliferated, particularly during the past ten years. The Wireless Spectrum explores how wireless technologies have modified both individual and public life, transforming our experiences of space, time, and place, while reshaping our day-to-day interactions.Bringing together visual artists, designers, activists, and communication and humanities ...