In this utterly original look at our modern "culture of performance," de Zengotita shows how media are creating self-reflective environments, custom made for each of us. From Princess Diana's funeral to the prospect of mass terror, from oral sex in the Oval Office to cowboy politics in distant lands, from high school cliques to marital therapy, from blogs to reality TV to the Weather Channel, Mediated takes us on an original and astonishing tour of every department of our media-saturated society. The implications are personal and far-reaching at the same time. Thomas de Zengotita is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. He teaches at the Dalton School and at the Draper Graduate Program at New York University. "Reading Thomas de Zengotita's Mediated is like spending time with a wild, wired friend-the kind who keeps you up late and lures you outside of your comfort zone with a speed rap full of brilliant notions."-O magazine "A fine roar of a lecture about how the American mind is shaped by (too much) media...."-Washington Post "Deceptively colloquial, intellectually dense...This provocative, extreme and compelling work is a must-read for philosophers of every stripe."-Publishers Weekly

Media Space: 20+ Years of Mediated Life is loosely divided into three different, but interconnected, approaches to media space research. Each part opens with an introduction that lays out how readers can best approach the book, and provides a basic guide to the theory and research literature, technological developments and other notable events to help contextualize the book. The ‘social ‘ approach uses the rhetoric and methods familiar to a CSCW audience, but moves into actual situations that involve close working bonds, broken trust, shared joy, community building, interpersonal tension, anxiety etc. The section on ‘spatial’ approaches guides the reader through an intellectual landscape of spatiality, the ‘communications’ part is a field guide to sense-making in the as-lived mediated condition, demonstrating that media space sense-making combines an understanding of in-the-moment alongside sense made of existence in the world and reflecting upon it.

Using the example of Iraqi refugees in Jordan's capital of Amman, this book describes how information and communication technologies (ICTs) play out in the everyday experiences of urban refugees, geographically located in the Global South, and shows how interactions between online and offline spaces are key for making sense of the humanitarian regime, for carving out a sense of home and for sustaining hope. This book paints a humanizing account of making do amid legal marginalization, prolonged insecurity, and the proliferation of digital technologies.

Considering texts by Henry James, Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Agee, and William Carlos Williams, alongside film, painting, music, and popular culture, Mark Goble explores the development of American modernism as it was shaped by its response to technology and an attempt to change how literature itself could communicate. Goble's original readings reinterpret the aesthetics of modernism in the early twentieth century, when new modes of communication made the experience of technology an occasion for profound experimentation and reflection. He follows the assimilation of such "old" media technologies as the telegraph, telephone, and phonograph and their role in inspiring fantasies of connection, which informed a commitment to the materiality of artistic mediums. Describing how relationships made possible by technology became more powerfully experienced with technology, Goble explores a modernist fetish for media that shows no signs of abating. The "mediated life" puts technology into communication with a series of shifts in how Americans conceive the mechanics and meanings of their connections to one another, and therefore to the world and to their own modernity.

Exploring mediated time, this book contemplates how far (and in what ways) media and time are intertwined from a diverse set of theoretical and empirical angles. It builds from theoretical discussions concerning the question of mediation and the normative framing of time (especially acceleration) and works its way through questions of time for/of one’s own, resisting temporalities, polychronicity, in-between-time, simultaneity and other time concepts. It further examines specific time frames, imaginations of a media future and the past, questions of online journalism and multitasking or liveness. Bringing together authors from diverse backgrounds, this collection presents a rich combination of milestone articles, new empirical research, enriching theoretical work and interviews with leading researchers to bridge sociology, media studies, and science and technology studies in one of the first book-length publications on the emerging field of media and time.

The Mediated World is written for students to engage in how we communicate with one another, how we understand our world, and how media shapes us. Using stories of our media and culture, this book offers historical context, integrates new media advances into each chapter, and takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of communication.

Calling attention to the unseen mediation and re-mediation of life narratives in online and physical spaces, this ground-breaking exploration uncovers the ever-changing strategies that authors, artists, publishers, curators, archivists and social media corporations adopt to shape, control or resist the auto/biographical in these texts. Concentrating on contemporary life texts found in the material book, museums, on social media and archives that present perceptions of individuality and autonomy, Reading Mediated Life Narratives exposes the traces of personal, cultural, technological, and political mediation that must be considered when developing reading strategies for such life narratives. Amy Carlson asks such questions as what agents act upon these narratives; what do the text, the creator, and the audience gain, and what do they lose; how do constantly evolving technologies shape or stymie the auto/biographical “I”; and finally, how do the mediations affect larger issues of social and collective memory? An examination of the range of sites at which vulnerability and intervention can occur, Carlson does not condemn but stages an intercession, showing us how it is increasingly necessary to register mediated agents and processes modifying the witnessing or recuperation of original texts that could condition our reception. With careful thought on how we remember, how we create and control our pictures, voices, words, and records, Reading Mediated Life Narratives reveals how we construct and negotiate our social identities and memories, but also what systems control us.