The New Media and Technocultures Reader

The study of new media has developed within a wide range of academic disciplines and theoretical paradigms and has generated a great deal of excitement, hype, and confusion. The New Media & Technocultures Reader gathers texts which map the cultural implications of new media, encapsulating and challenging key debates, theoretical positions, and approaches to research.
The New Media & Technocultures Reader offers students further reading on and exploration of key issues and topics raised in the textbook New Media: A Critical Introduction. The Reader draws on various disciplinary stances (including visual culture; media and cultural history; media theory; media production; philosophy and the history of the sciences; political economy and sociology), offering readers a rich and interdisciplinary resource. Critical and accessible editorial commentary guides the reader between the extracts and through the debates.

Seth Giddings and Martin Lister are members of the Department of Culture, Media and Drama, in the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of the West of England, Bristol.

Acknowledgements

Permissions

Introduction


PART 1: Genealogies of Technoculture

1.1 The first and second industrial revolution

Norbert Wiener

1.2 The ontology of the enemy: Norbert Wiener and the cybernetic vision

Peter Galison

1.3 Dazzling the multitude: original media spectacles

Carolyn Marvin

1.4 Selected material from Computer Lib / Dream Machines

Ted Nelson

1.5 From Kaleidoscomaniac to cybernerd: Towards an archaeology of the media

Erkki Huhtamo

1.6 Introduction to War in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Manuel de Landa


PART 2: Models of Technology, Media and Culture

2.1 The labour process and alienation in machinery and science

Karl Marx

2.2 Selected material from Understanding Media: the extensions of man (‘The medium is the message’, ‘Media as translators’, ‘The typewriter’)

Marshall McLuhan

2.3 The technology and the society

Raymond Williams

2.4 The proliferation of hybrids

Bruno Latour

2.5 The vanishing point of communication

Jean Baudrillard

2.6 ‘The informatics of domination’ and ‘Women in the integrated circuit’ from A Cyborg Manifesto

Donna Haraway

2.7 Balance program for desiring machines

Feliz Guattari


PART 3: Bodies and Agents

3.1 Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts

Bruno Latour

3.2 Cyborgs, coyotes and dogs: a kinship of feminist figurations / there are always more things going on than you thought: methodologies as thinking technologies

Donna Haraway

3.3 Feedback and cybernetics: reimaging the body in the age of the cyborg

David Tomas

3.4 Creatures on the Internet

Sarah Kember

3.5 Intelligent Agency

J. Macgregor Wise

3.6 Female Quake players and the politics of identity

Helen Kennedy


PART 4: Texts, Forms, Codes

4.1 Virtuality

Benjamin Woolley

4.2 Interactivity

Pierre Levy

4.3 The adventure game

Espen Aarseth

4.4 Selected material from The Language of New Media (‘The database’ and ‘Navigable space’)

Lev Manovich

4.5 Invisible media

Laura U. Marks

4.6 Theses on distributed aesthetics

Geert Lovinck

4.7 "Hacking" the iPod: A Look Inside Apple’s Portable Music Player

Gabrielle Consentino

4.8 Listening in cyberspace

Mark Katz

4.9 Hybrid Cinema: The Mask, Masques and Tex Avery

Norman Klein

4.10 Photography in the age of electronic imaging

Martin Lister

4.11 ‘Eyeball’ from Pilgrim in the Microworld: eye, mind and the essence of video skill

David Sudnow


PART 5: Network Culture

5.1 Trading sexpics on IRC : embodiment and authenticity on the internet

Don Slater

5.2 Free labour

Tiziana Terranova

5.3 Gaming lifeworlds: social play in persistent environments

T.L. Taylor

5.4 Technoscience in hypertext

Donna Haraway

5.5 Updating tactical media

Geert Lovinck

5.6 Indymedia.org: a new communications commons

Dorothy Kidd


PART 6: Everyday Media Technocultures

6.1 The domestic ecology of objects

Elaine Lally

6.2 Domesticating New Media: A discussion on locating mobile media

Larissa Hjorth

6.3 Bergson’s iPod? The cognitive management of everyday life

Michael Bull

6.4 Everyday (virtual) life

Mark Poster

6.5 Japan’s mobile technoculture: the productions of a cellular playscape and its cultural implications

Michal Daliot-Bul

6.6 Playspaces, childhood and videogames

Shanly Dixon & Sandra Weber

6.7 Mobilizing imagination in everyday play: the case of Japanese media mixes

Mizuko Ito


Index