The ever-increasing integration of technology and the human body is attracting attention from religious, business, and political leaders around the world, and the topic promises to be a significant social issue in the 21st century. In Mediating the Human Body: Technology, Communication, and Fashion, editors Leopoldina Fortunati, James E. Katz, and Raimonda Riccini bring together a thoughtful group of leading international scholars and analysts to explore the effects of new technologies on human beings. They focus specifically on the intersection of new communication technologies and the body, and offer novel insights based on recent theoretical progress and current research on new interpersonal technology. Through literary analysis, historical comparisons, analytical reports, and speculative interpretations, the contributors to this volume seek to understand the experience of the body as it is mediated among competing forces and intellectual domains. Arising from The Human Body Between Technologies, Communication and Fashion symposium held in Milan, Italy, contributions cover a wide array of topics and offer varied perspectives on how communication technologies are assimilated into people's lives, bodies, and homes, and thus become part of individuals' self-images and social relationships. From this multidisciplinary, multi-national base, the volume illuminates the sense and dimension of this interpenetration between body and technology. In its broad scope, the topics range from the wellsprings of consciousness to the use of technology as a fashion statement. Bringing together scholarship from a variety of disciplines, including communication, medicine, technology, and human-computer interaction, this distinctive anthology will provide new insights to scholars and advanced students exploring body-technology intersections and the attendant implications. Mediating the Human Body offers a unique contribution to future discussions, and will be relevant to continuing study and research in communication and technology, human-computer interaction, gender studies, social psychology, and design.

The ever-increasing integration of technology and the human body is attracting attention from religious, business, and political leaders around the world, and the topic promises to be a significant social issue in the 21st century. In Mediating the Human Body: Technology, Communication, and Fashion, editors Leopoldina Fortunati, James E. Katz, and Raimonda Riccini bring together a thoughtful group of leading international scholars and analysts to explore the effects of new technologies on human beings. They focus specifically on the intersection of new communication technologies and the body, and offer novel insights based on recent theoretical progress and current research on new interpersonal technology. Through literary analysis, historical comparisons, analytical reports, and speculative interpretations, the contributors to this volume seek to understand the experience of the body as it is mediated among competing forces and intellectual domains. Arising from The Human Body Between Technologies, Communication and Fashion symposium held in Milan, Italy, contributions cover a wide array of topics and offer varied perspectives on how communication technologies are assimilated into people's lives, bodies, and homes, and thus become part of individuals' self-images and social relationships. From this multidisciplinary, multi-national base, the volume illuminates the sense and dimension of this interpenetration between body and technology. In its broad scope, the topics range from the wellsprings of consciousness to the use of technology as a fashion statement. Bringing together scholarship from a variety of disciplines, including communication, medicine, technology, and human-computer interaction, this distinctive anthology will provide new insights to scholars and advanced students exploring body-technology intersections and the attendant implications. Mediating the Human Body offers a unique contribution to future discussions, and will be relevant to continuing study and research in communication and technology, human-computer interaction, gender studies, social psychology, and design.

As a literary genre, the nonfictional reportage has particular implications for the role of the writer. Pascal Sigg shows how six U.S. American writers, including David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, reflect on themselves as human media in their reportage. The writers assert themselves in a postmodern way by scrutinizing their own mediation. As it also traces and develops the theorization of reportage as genre along the reporters' early concerns with technical media, this pioneering contribution to literary journalism studies paves a way for a new materialist approach in the under-researched field.

After the end of the civil war in 1990, the Charismatic/Pentecostal (C/P) movement in Beirut spread across various Christian denominations. C/P believers narrated how Jesus became real to them via the experience of the Holy Spirit. The author explains this impression of realness through embodiment. Ritual practices like testimony and experience of divine agency are experienced as fullness within a post war society and are extended into the every day sphere. This ethnographic account represents the beginning research of C/P Christianity's emergence in the Middle East and its contribution to social change.

Mediating Nature considers how technology acts as a mediating device in the construction and circulation of images that inform how we see and know nature. Scholarship in environmental communication has focused almost exclusively on verbal rather than visual rhetoric, and this book engages ecocritical and ecocompositional inquiry to shift focus onto the making of images. Contributors to this dynamic collection focus their efforts on the intersections of digital media and environmental/ecological thinking. Part of the book’s larger argument is that analysis of mediations of nature must develop more critical tools of analysis toward the very mediating technologies that produce such media. That is, to truly understand mediations of nature, one needs to understand the creation and production of those mediations, right down to the algorithms, circuit boards, and power sources that drive mediating technologies. Ultimately, Mediating Nature contends that ecological literacy and environmental politics are inseparable from digital literacies and visual rhetorics. The book will be of interest to scholars and students working in the fields of Ecocriticism, Ecocomposition, Media Ecology, Visual Rehtoric, and Digital Literacy Studies.

What shapes the role of Information and Communication Technologies in our everyday life? Despite the speed with which information and communication technologies such as the PC, mobile telephone and internet have found their way into society, there remains a good deal of debate surrounding their adoption and use. Through empirical studies covering a broad range of everyday life and work settings, this volume provides grounded insights into the social dynamics influencing how ICTs are both shaped and experienced. Specifically, the book examines the contributions of diverse disciplines to our understanding of these processes, the symbolic nature of technologies, the influence of design on the experience of ICTs, the role of users in influencing that design, the social constraints affecting the use of those technologies, and strategies for evaluating the social consequences of ICT innovations.

Hailed as one of the "most significant books of the twentieth century" by Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Mediating the Message has long been an essential text for media effects scholars and students of media sociology. This new edition of the classic media sociology textbook now offers students a comprehensive, theoretical approach to media content in the twenty-first century, with an added focus on entertainment media and the Internet.