Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology (MediaMatters, 2) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9089640681 ISBN 13: 9789089640680

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Three decades of societal and cultural alignment of new media have yielded a host of innovations, trials, and problems, accompanied by versatile popular and academic discourse. New Media Studies crystallized internationally into an established academic discipline, and this begs the question: where do we stand now? Which new questions are emerging now that new media are being taken for granted, and which riddles are still unsolved? Is contemporary digital culture indeed all about 'you', the participating user, or do we still not really understand the digital machinery and how this constitutes us as 'you'? The contributors to the present book, all employed in teaching and researching new media and digital culture, assembled their 'digital material' into an anthology, covering issues ranging from desktop metaphors to Web 2.0 ecosystems, from touch screens to blogging and e-learning, from role-playing games and cybergothic music to wireless dreams. Together the contributions provide a showcase of current research in the field, from what may be called a 'digital-materialist' perspective.

About this title

About the Author:

Ann-Sophie Lehmann is professor for art history & material culture at the University of Groningen. Her research has a process-based, transhistorical approach and shows how materials, tools, and practices partake in the meaning making of art. Sybille Lammes is Full Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at The Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) at Leiden University. She has been a visiting Senior Research Fellow at The University of Manchester, and has worked as a researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, as well as the media studies departments of Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam. Her background is in media studies and play studies, which she has always approached from an interdisciplinary angle, including cultural studies, science and technology studies, postcolonial studies, and critical geography. She is co-editor of Playful identities: The ludification of digital media cultures (Amsterdam University Press 2015), Mapping time (Manchester University Press 2018; forthcoming) and The Routledge handbook of interdisciplinary research methods (Routledge 2018; forthcoming). She is an ERC laureate and has been the PI of numerous research projects. Joost Raessens is chair and Full Professor of Media Theory at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and scientific director of the Utrecht Center for Game Research (gameresearch.nl). His research concerns the 'ludification of culture,' focusing on games for change in relation to global climate change and refugee and migration issues. Raessens was conference chair of the first DiGRA conference Level Up in Utrecht (digra2003.org) and leads the research project "Persuasive gaming: From theory-based design to validation and back" (persuasivegaming.nl). Along his book publications (see raessens.nl for a complete overview) are the Handbook of computer games studies (The MIT Press 2005), Homo ludens 2.0: The ludic turn in media theory (Utrecht University 2012), and Playful identities: The ludification of digital media cultures (Amsterdam University Press 2015). Mirko Tobias Schäfer is Assistant Professor for New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Utrecht and principal investigator of the Utrecht Data School. He is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Humanities at the University of Utrecht. His book Bastard Culture! How User participation Transforms Cultural Production (2011) has been favorably reviewed by peer-reviewed journals.

Review:

The book proposes excellent essays of the status of the digital archive, the definition of new forms of indexicality, and of audience participation.
Jan Baetens, Leonardo Reviews

About this edition

• Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 9089640681
• ISBN 13: 9789089640680
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Lehmann Ann-Sophie, Raessens Joost, Schäfer Mirko Tobias Van Den, Boomen Marianne Van Den, Lammes Sybille