This startling exploration of the mass media age uniquely combines complex nonfiction and prescient fiction from the best and brightest visionaries of the future. Essay contributors include Marshall McLuhan, who posited that the medium is the message; Cory Doctorow and his re-visioning of intellectual property in the digital age; and Nicolas Carr, whose cautionary warnings include that Google is making us stupid. The thought-provoking short stories are authored by science fiction luminaries including James Tiptree Jr., whose pseudonymous cyperpunk preceded all of her peers; Joe Haldeman and his wars where humans fight through cloning and time travel; and Norman Spinrad, who has pitted the media against an immortality conspiracy. Offering a blend of predictions for the course of communications, Future Media entertains while it informs and challenges readers to consider the implications for a society dealing with networks that are alternately personal, public, pervasive, and powerful.

The revolution will not be televised. But will it be online instead? When the Internet first took off, we heard a lot about its potential for social change. We heard it would revitalize democracy. We heard it would empower us. We heard we would all be publishers, working together to create a new public sphere. Future Active tests such claims. With fierce intelligence and wit, Graham Meikle takes us behind the digital barricades and into the heart of Internet activist campaigns. In the first in-depth look at this global phenomenon, the author talks to key players in the Indymedia movement and introduces us to the activists behind gwbush.com, the website that provoked the President to declare there ought to be limits to freedom. The founder of Belgrade radio station B92 explains how they used the net to thwart Milosevic's censorship, while McLibel trial defendant Dave Morris talks about the role of the McSpotlight website. And pioneer hacktivists the Electronic Disturbance Theater introduce us to virtual sit-ins and electronic civil disobedience - while US military analysts offer a different perspective on this kind of information warfare. Future Active is an accessible, comprehensive, and supremely readable introduction to the world of online activism. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in how hackers, culture jammers, and media activists have not only incorporated recent technology as a tool for change, but also redefined what counts as activism.

The iPhone has revolutionized not only how people communicate but also how we consume and produce culture. Combining traditional and social media with mobile connectivity, smartphones have redefined and expanded the dimensions of everyday life, allowing individuals to personalize media as they move and process constant flows of data. Today, millions of consumers love and live by their iPhones, but what are the implications of its special technology on society, media, and culture? Featuring an eclectic mix of original essays, Moving Data explores the iPhone as technological prototype, lifestyle gadget, and platform for media creativity. Media experts, cultural critics, and scholars consider the device's newness and usability—even its "lickability"—and its "biographical" story. The book illuminates patterns of consumption; the fate of solitude against smartphone ubiquity; the economy of the App Store and its perceived "crisis of choice"; and the distance between the accessibility of digital information and the protocols governing its use. Alternating between critical and conceptual analyses, essays link the design of participatory media to the iPhone's technological features and sharing routines, and they follow the extent to which the pleasures of gesture-based interfaces are redefining media use and sensory experience. They also consider how user-led innovations, collaborative mapping, and creative empowerment are understood and reconciled through changes in mobile surveillance, personal rights, and prescriptive social software. Presenting a range of perspectives and arguments, this book reorients the practice and study of media critique.

An investigation of the future of various media industries and technologies that considers how media shape our future. How do we combat post-truth in the news? Are social media influencers the journalists of today? What is it like to live in a smart city? Does AI really change "everything"? The Future of Media investigates the future of media industries and technologies (journalism, TV, film, photography, radio, publishing, social media), while exploring how media shape our future—on a political, economic, cultural and individual level. Issues of diversity, media reform, labour, activism and art take the discussion into a wider social context. Through this, the book celebrates the importance and vitality of media in the modern world. The Future of Media is also an experiment in collaborative modes of thinking and working. Co-authored by theorists and practitioners from one of the world’s most established media departments, it offers a radical, creative and critical take on media industries—and on world affairs.

This collection of original essays addresses a number of questions seeking to increase our understanding of the role of blogs in the contemporary media landscape. It takes a provocative look at how blogs are reshaping culture, media, and politics while offering multiple theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to the study. Americans are increasingly turning to blogs for news, information, and entertainment. But what is the content of blogs? Who writes them? What is the consequence of the population’s growing dependence on blogs for political information? What are the effects of blogging? Do readers trust blogs as credible sources of information? The volume includes quantitative and qualitative studies of the blogosphere, its contents, its authors, and its networked connections. The readers of blogs are another focus of the collection: how are blog readers different from the rest of the population? What consequences do blogs have for the lives of everyday people? Finally, the book explores the ramifications of the blog phenomenon on the future of traditional media: television, newspapers, and radio.

A sophisticated critical take on contemporary game culture that reconsiders the boundaries between gamers and games. This book is not about the future of video games. It is not an attempt to predict the moods of the market, the changing profile of gamers, the benevolence or malevolence of the medium. This book is about those predictions. It is about the ways in which the past, present, and future notions of games are narrated and negotiated by a small group of producers, journalists, and gamers, and about how invested these narrators are in telling the story of tomorrow. This new title from Goldsmiths Press by Paolo Ruffino suggests the story could be told another way. Considering game culture, from the gamification of self-improvement to GamerGate's sexism and violence, Ruffino lays out an alternative, creative mode of thinking about the medium: a sophisticated critical take that blurs the distinctions among studying, playing, making, and living with video games. Offering a series of stories that provide alternative narratives of digital gaming, Ruffino aims to encourage all of us who study and play (with) games to raise ethical questions, both about our own role in shaping the objects of research, and about our involvement in the discourses we produce as gamers and scholars. For researchers and students seeking a fresh approach to game studies, and for anyone with an interest in breaking open the current locked-box discourse, Future Gaming offers a radical lens with which to view the future.

Discusses the impact online social networking has had on business, politics, media, and culture, and how it will affect the future.