Curating Media and Design

Book: Mediation and Protest Movements

Over the past year, international and national media have been full of stories about protest movements and tumultuous social upheaval from Tunisia to California. But scholars have not yet fully addressed the connection between these movements and the media and communication channels through which their messages spread.

Correcting that imbalance, Mediation and Protest Movements explores the nature of the relationship between protest movements, media representation, and communication strategies and tactics. By covering online and offline contexts, as well as mainstream and alternative media, Mediation and Protest Movements bridges the gap between social-movement theory and media and communication studies, making this an important text for students and scholars of the media and social change.

Editors: Bart Cammaerts, Alice Mattoni, and Patrick McCurdy

Publisher: Intellect, 2013

Book: Producing the Internet – Critical Perspectives of Social Media

Should contemporary media culture be understood as a culture that offers unprecedented freedom for producing participators – so-called “produsers”, or should it rather be understood as a culture in which various forms of user participation in fact are conditioned, or even manufactured, by organized, professional producers?

The contributions to this book add to our critical understanding of these new forms of media. They all draw on various theoretical concepts – such as producers, community, and participation – used when analysing media culture. But they also share a critical interest in problematizing and analysing the forms of power built into this culture.

Editor: Tobias Olsson

Publisher: Nordicom, 2013

Selected chapter titles:

Social Media and Capitalism
Dirty Work. Why Journalists Shun Reader Comments
Transmedia Storytelling and a Young Audience. Public Service in the Blogosphere Era

Book: Spreadable Media – Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

Spreadable Media, by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, maps fundamental changes taking place in our contemporary media environment, a space where corporations no longer tightly control media distribution and many of us are directly involved in the circulation of content.

The authors introduce the concept of “spreadability” to describe the ways content travels through social media.

If you don’t have the time to read the book you can listen to a discussion about it from SXSW Interactive 2013.

Authors: Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green

Publisher: NYU Press, 2013.

Book: Beyond WikiLeaks – Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism, and Society

Beyond WikiLeaks opens a space to reflect on the broader implications across political and media fields, and on the transformations that result from new forms of leak journalism and transparency activism.

A select group of renowned scholars, international experts, and WikiLeaks ‘insiders’ discuss the consequences of the WikiLeaks saga for traditional media, international journalism, freedom of expression, policymaking, civil society, social change, and international politics.

Edited by Benedetta Brevini, Arne Hintz and Patrick McCurdy

Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=637302

Authors include: Harvard University’s Yochai Benkler; Graham Murdoch of Loughborough University; net activism scholar, Gabriella Coleman; the Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jillian York; and Guardian editor, Chris Elliott. The book also includes a conversation between philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, and WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, and its prologue is written by Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Icelandic MP and editor of the WikiLeaks video ‘Collateral Murder’.

Book: Media interventions (essay collection)

This collection of essays, the first book-length treatment of its kind, explicates the concept of “media interventions” herein defined as activities and projects that secure, exercise, challenge or acquire media power for tactical and strategic action.

Edited by Kevin Howley w. afterword by Nick Couldry.

Published by Peter Lang, 2013.

MORE – Drawing on insights from media, communication and cultural studies, contributors offer penetrating analyses of media interventions in a variety of social, political, and cultural settings from culture jamming and DIY media, to public relations campaigns and reality television shows. In doing so, the volume develops an analytical framework for examining the complex and contradictory operation of media power in contemporary society.

Book: Digital Disconnect – How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“In Digital Disconnect, Robert McChesney offers a groundbreaking critique of the Internet, urging us to reclaim the democratizing potential of the digital revolution while we still can.”

Author: Robert McChesney, professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and previous host of Media Matters.

Publisher: The New Press, 2013.

Full details: http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Disconnect-Capitalism-Internet-Democracy/dp/1595588671

Book: De-convergence of Global Media Industries

Convergence has become a buzzword, referring on the one hand to the integration between computers, television, and mobile devices or between print, broadcast, and online media and on the other hand, the ownership of multiple content or distribution channels in media and communications.

Yet while convergence among communications companies has been the major trend in the neoliberal era, the splintering of companies, de-convergence, is now gaining momentum in the communications market. As the first comprehensive attempt to analyze the wave of de-convergence of the global media system in the context of globalization, this book makes sense of those transitions by looking at global trends and how global media firms have changed and developed their business paradigm from convergence to de-convergence.

Author: Dal Yong Jin, Simon Fraser University

Publisher: Routledge, 2013

Book details: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415623438/

Book: To Save Everything, Click Here – The Folly of Technological Solutionism (Evgeny Morozov)

The Guardian recently published an interview with author and “anti-solutionist” Evgeny Morozov whose second book To Save Everything, Click Here just hit the bookstores.

Author: Evgeny Morozov

Publisher: Public Affairs, 2013.

BOOK BLURB: In the very near future, “smart” technologies and “big data” will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions in politics, culture, and everyday life. Technology will allow us to solve problems in highly original ways and create new incentives to get more people to do the right thing. But how will such “solutionism” affect our society, once deeply political, moral, and irresolvable dilemmas are recast as uncontroversial and easily manageable matters of technological efficiency? What if some such problems are simply vices in disguise? What if some friction in communication is productive and some hypocrisy in politics necessary? The temptation of the digital age is to fix everything—from crime to corruption to pollution to obesity—by digitally quantifying, tracking, or gamifying behavior. But when we change the motivations for our moral, ethical, and civic behavior we may also change the very nature of that behavior. Technology, Evgeny Morozov proposes, can be a force for improvement—but only if we keep solutionism in check and learn to appreciate the imperfections of liberal democracy. Some of those imperfections are not accidental but by design.

Arguing that we badly need a new, post-Internet way to debate the moral consequences of digital technologies, To Save Everything, Click Here warns against a world of seamless efficiency, where everyone is forced to wear Silicon Valley’s digital straitjacket.

Book: Aaron Swartz – The Programmable Web (CC:BY-NC-SA)

The Programmable Web is a draft written by Aaron Swartz, meant to be published as a book.

The publisher writes:

As a tribute to Aaron, we have posted his work on our site as a free PDF download. It is licensed under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA-NC) license. The work stands as originally written, with only a few typographical errors corrected to improve readability.

From the introduction:

we will begin by trying to understand the architecture of the Web – what it got right and, occasionally, what it got wrong, but most importantly why it is the way it is. We will learn how it allows both users and search engines to co-exist peacefully while supporting everything from photo-sharing to financial transactions.

Download free PDF.

Hat tip Jonas Löwgren.

Image credit: Flickr user Mataparda CC:BY-NC-SA

Book: The Mediatization of Culture and Society

Mediatization has emerged as a key concept to reconsider old, yet fundamental questions about the role and influence of media in culture and society. This book presents a major contribution to the theoretical understanding of the mediatization of culture and society.

Author: Stig Hjarvard, PhD, Professor and Vice-Chair at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Publisher: Routledge, Feb 2013.

Full details: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415692373/

MORE – Mediatization represents a new social condition in which the media have emerged as an important institution in society at the same time as they have become integrated into the very fabric of social and cultural life. Making use of a broad conception of the media as technologies, institutions and aesthetic forms, Stig Hjarvard considers how characteristics of both old and new media come to influence human interaction, social institutions and cultural imaginations.

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