A "dirty materialist" ride through the media cultures of pirate radio, photography, the Internet, media art, cultural evolution, and surveillance.

This study highlights dramatic changes in worldwide media production, detailing how collaborations—in the form of co-productions, format franchising and audience interactivity—define the new media economy, and affect a shift across the entire field of cultural production. These developments also reflect broader trends in cultural and economic globalization.

This volume reads the global urban environment through mediated sonic practices to put a contemporary spin on acoustic ecology’s investigations at the intersection of space, cultures, technology, and the senses. Acoustic ecology is an interdisciplinary framework from the 1970s for documenting, analyzing, and transforming sonic environments: an early model of the cross-boundary thinking and multi-modal practices now common across the digital humanities. With the recent emergence of sound studies and the expansion of “ecological” thinking, there is an increased urgency to re-discover and contemporize the acoustic ecology tradition. This book serves as a comprehensive investigation into the ways in which current scholars working with sound are re-inventing acoustic ecology across diverse fields, drawing on acoustic ecology’s focus on sensory experience, place, and applied research, as well as attendance to mediatized practices in sounded space. From sounding out the Anthropocene, to rethinking our auditory media landscapes, to exploring citizenship and community, this volume brings the original acoustic ecology problem set into the contemporary landscape of sound studies.

Until now, the academic foundations of media ecology have been passed down primarily in the form of edited volumes, often by students of Neil Postman, or are limited to a focus on Marshall McLuhan and/or Postman or some other individual important to the field. Those volumes are invaluable in pointing to key ideas in the field; they provide an important and informed account of the fundamentals of media ecology as set forth at the field's inception. Yet there is more to the story. Offering an accessible introduction, and written from the perspective of a «second generation» scholar, this single-authored work provides a unified, systematic framework for the study of media ecology. It identifies the key themes, processes, and figures in media ecology that have coalesced over the last few decades and presents an elegant schema with which to engage future exploration of the role of media in shaping culture and consciousness. Dennis D. Cali offers a survey of a field as consequential as it is fascinating. Designed to be used primarily in media and communication courses, the book's goal is to hone insight into the role of media in society and to extend the understanding of the themes, processes, and interactions of media ecology to an ever-broader intellectual community.

Our digital world is often described using terms such as immateriality and virtuality. The discourse of cloud computing is the latest in a long line of nebulous, dematerialising tropes which have come to dominate how we think about information and communication technologies. Digital Media Ecologies argues that such rhetoric is highly misleading, and that engaging with the key cultural, agential, ethical and political impacts of contemporary media requires that we do not just engage with the surface level of content encountered by the end users of digital media, but that we must additionally consider the affordances of software and hardware. Whilst numerous existing approaches explore content, software and hardware individually, Digital Media Ecologies provides a critical intervention by insisting that addressing contemporary technoculture requires a synthetic approach that traverses these three registers. Digital Media Ecologies re-envisions the methodological approach of media ecology to go beyond the metaphor of a symbolic information environment that exists alongside a material world of tantalum, turtles and tornados. It illustrates the social, cultural, political and environmental impacts of contemporary media assemblages through examples that include mining conflict-sustaining minerals, climate change blogging, iOS jailbreaking, and the ecological footprint of contemporary computing infrastructures. Alongside foregrounding the deleterious social and environmental impacts of digital technologies, the book considers numerous ways that these issues are being tackled by a heterogeneous array of activists, academics, hackers, scientists and citizens using the same technological assemblages that ostensibly cause these problems.

The Handbook of Media and Mass Communication Theory presents a comprehensive collection of original essays that focus on all aspects of current and classic theories and practices relating to media and mass communication. Focuses on all aspects of current and classic theories and practices relating to media and mass communication Includes essays from a variety of global contexts, from Asia and the Middle East to the Americas Gives niche theories new life in several essays that use them to illuminate their application in specific contexts Features coverage of a wide variety of theoretical perspectives Pays close attention to the use of theory in understanding new communication contexts, such as social media 2 Volumes

Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition provides a long-awaited and much anticipated introduction to media ecology, a field of inquiry defined as the study of media as environments. Lance Strate presents a clear and concise explanation of an intellectual tradition concerned with much more than understanding media, but rather with understanding the conditions that shape us as human beings, drive human history, and determine the prospects for our survival as a species. Much more than a summary, this book represents a new synthesis that moves the field forward in a manner that is both unique and unprecedented, and simultaneously grounded in an unparalleled grasp of media ecology's intellectual foundations and its relation to other disciplines. Taking as its subject matter "life, the universe, and everything," Strate describes the field as interdisciplinary and communication-centered, provides a detailed explication of McLuhan's famous aphorism, "the medium is the message," and explains that the human condition can only be understood in the context of our biophysical, technological, and symbolic environments. Strate provides an in-depth examination of media ecology's four key terms: medium, which is defined in much broader terms than in other fields; bias, which refers to tendencies inherent in materials and methods; effects, which are best understood via the Aristotelian notion of formal causality and contemporary systems theory; and environment, which includes the distinctions between the oral, chirographic, typographic, and electronic media environments. A chapter on tools serves as a guide to further media ecological research and scholarship. This book is well suited for graduate and undergraduate courses on communication theory and philosophy.