Alternative and Activist New Media provides a rich and accessible overview of the ways in which activists, artists, and citizen groups around the world use new media and information technologies to gain visibility and voice, present alternative or marginal views, share their own DIY information systems and content, and otherwise resist, talk back to, or confront dominant media culture. Today, a lively and contentious cycle of capture, cooptation, and subversion of information, content, and system design marks the relationship between the mainstream ‘center’ and the interactive, participatory ‘edges’ of media culture.

Five principle forms of alternative and activist new media projects are introduced, including the characteristics that make them different from more conventional media forms and content. The book traces the historical roots of these projects in alternative media, social movements, and activist art, including analyses of key case studies and links to relevant electronic resources. Alternative and Activist New Media will be a useful addition to any course on new media and society, and essential for readers interested in new media activism.

Fully revised to reflect today's media environment, this new edition of Critical Media Studies offers students a comprehensive introduction to the field and demonstrates how to think critically about the power and influence of media in our daily lives. Presents an engaging and comprehensive introduction to a broad range of critical approaches to the field written in an accessible way Features a new chapter on sociological analysis that reveals how audiences use media in their everyday lives to manage social roles, relationships, and contexts Offers substantial updates to examples used in the book to reflect contemporary industry standards, textual forms, and audience behaviors Delivers up-to-date media references that resonate with today's undergraduates Updated with more global examples for broader appeal Enhanced online resources, including PowerPoint slides, test bank, study guides and sample assignments, available upon publication at www.wiley.com/go/criticalmediastudies

This hands-on survey introduces students to the diverse fields that comprise cultural studies, from visual culture to popular music and new media. It can be used as a standalone text or as a companion volume to Ryan's Cultural Studies: An Anthology. Provides a comprehensive overview of the field, from cyberculture and digital media to fashion and new formulations of gender identity. Includes student exercises and activities for each chapter. Teaches cultural analysis through practical examples and application. Gives students across disciplines the tools to become practitioners of Cultural Studies and active cultural analysts.

Table of Contents: Policy and industry -- Place, space, and geography -- Gender and sexuality -- Ideologies -- Rhetoric -- Ethnicity -- Identity, lifestyle, and subculture -- Consumer culture and fashion studies -- Music -- Media studies -- Visual culture -- Audience, performance, and celebrity -- Bodies and things -- Transnationality, globalization, and postcoloniality.

Table of Contents: The history and future of ideas -- Cultural studies, creative industries, and cultural science -- Journalism and popular culture -- The distribution of public thought -- Television goes online -- Silly citizenship -- The probability archive -- Messaging as identity -- Paradigm shifters: tricksters and cultural science

Arguing that "first encounters" have already applied traditional theoretical and conceptual frameworks to digital media, the contributors to this book call for "second encounters," or a revisiting. Digital media are not only objects of analysis but also instruments for the development of innovative perspectives on both media and culture. Drawing on insights from literary theory, semiotics, philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, media studies, sociology, and education, the contributors construct new positions from which to observe digital media in fresh and meaningful ways. Throughout they explore to what extent interpretation of and experimentation with digital media can inform theory. It also asks how our understanding of digital media can contribute to our understanding of social and cultural change. The book is organized in four sections: Education and Interdisciplinarity, Design and Aesthetics, Rhetoric and Interpretation, and Social Theory and Ethics. The topics include the effects on reading of the multimodal and multisensory aspects of the digital environment, the impact of practice on the medium of theory, how digital media are dissolving the boundaries between leisure and work, and the impact of cyberspace on established ethical principles.

This handbook offers a much-needed overview of the rapidly growing field of digital sociology. Rooted in a critical understanding of inequality as foundational to digital sociology, it connects digital media technologies to traditional areas of study in sociology, such as labor, culture, education, race, class, and gender. It covers a wide variety of topics, including web analytics, wearable technologies, social media analysis, and digital labor. The result is a benchmark volume that places the digital squarely at the forefront of contemporary investigations of the social.

Analyzing the relationship between digital technologies and society this book explores a wide range of complex social issues emerging in a new digital space. It examines both the vexing dilemmmas with a critical eye as well as prompting readers to think constructively and strategically about exciting possibilities.

Contents:
Introduction
Properties of Technology
Part I: Digital Communication
1 Technology, Innovation, Power, and Social Consequence
Part II: Defining New Media
2 Emergent Journalism and Mass Media Paradigms in the Digital Society
Part III: The Texts of Digital Publishing
3 Academic Publishing at the Crossroads
Part IV: The Digital Citizen
4 Digital Citizenship
Part V: Power, Knowledge, Surveillance
5 Surveillance, Power and Everyday Life
Part VI: Digital Property 6 Whose Property? Mapping Intellectual Property Rights, Contextualizing Digital Technology and Framing Social JusticePart VII: The Digital Commons
7 Socrates Back on the Street: Wikipedia's Citing of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Part VIII: New Infrastructures of Science
8 Towards a Science 2.0 based on Technologies of Recommendation, Innovation, and Reuse
Part IX: Digital Aesthetics
9 Fabrication
Part X: Digital Labor
10 Redrawing the Labor Line: Technology and Work in Digital Capitalism
Part XI: Technology, Culture, and Society 11 The Empirical Case for Taking a Technosocial Approach to ComputingPart XII: Digital Identities
12 The Internet, Gender and Identity: Proletarianization as Selective Essentialism
Part XIII: Information Globalism
13 Digital Capitalism and Development: The Unbearable Lightness of ICT4D
Part XIV: Reading Machines
14 Do E-Book Readers Understand Digital Documents?
Conclusion
Mapping Emerging Digital Spaces in Contemporary Society

This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control. IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that can’t be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners. These “tethered appliances” have already been used in remarkable but little-known ways: car GPS systems have been reconfigured at the demand of law enforcement to eavesdrop on the occupants at all times, and digital video recorders have been ordered to self-destruct thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer thousands of miles away. New Web 2.0 platforms like Google mash-ups and Facebook are rightly touted—but their applications can be similarly monitored and eliminated from a central source. As tethered appliances and applications eclipse the PC, the very nature of the Internet—its “generativity,” or innovative character—is at risk. The Internet’s current trajectory is one of lost opportunity. Its salvation, Zittrain argues, lies in the hands of its millions of users. Drawing on generative technologies like Wikipedia that have so far survived their own successes, this book shows how to develop new technologies and social structures that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and become true “netizens.”

Communications and Humanity advances a new theory of media that explains the origins and impact of different forms of communication - speech, writing, print, electronic devices, and the Internet - on human history in the long term. New media are "pulled" into widespread use by broad historical trends and these media, once in widespread use, "push" social institutions and beliefs in predictable directions. This view allows us to see for the first time what is truly new about the Internet, what is not, and where it is taking us.

The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies brings together over 175 critical essays to redraw the boundaries of this rapidly evolving and dynamically complex area. Global in scope, wide-ranging in its inclusion of topics, and edited by an international team of the world's best scholars, this is the definitive resource for the field. Includes more than 175 essays written by over 200 leading and emerging scholars from across the globe Arranged across 6 thematic volumes edited by an international team of expert scholars Accessible volume introductions provide overviews of key themes The most definitive resource available in this complex, heterogeneous, multi-methodological and multi-theoretical interdisciplinary field Explores media as it is being practiced, produced, and analyzed in Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and Europe All volumes pay close attention to issues of gender and ethnicity so necessary to understanding contemporary media Probes the many dimensions of the subject: history, production, content, audiences, effects, and futures