Digital Feeling

This book offers a trailblazing account of postfeminist sensibility as a digital feeling that shapes how we understand the world around us. It explores how we feel in a world where the digital has become intertwined with our intimate relationships to ourselves and to others. The book develops a novel approach that draws on feminist theories of affect, emotion, and structures of feeling, to analyse the entanglements of the digital and the non-digital, and the public and the private, and to show how good feeling shapes a contemporary moment that often leads us back to normativity and reproduces systemic inequality. This is achieved through several different digital media spheres, including: the Instagram account Barbie Savior, #fitspo content, TikTok influencers and their Get Ready With Me videos, the archive of hot men on TubeCrush, and the intimacies of the internet cat, suggesting that each offers a snapshot of our current emotional landscapes.

An analysis of emerging LGBTQ+ media, queer spaces in urban areas, and sexual identity. The explosion of cable networks, cinema distributors, and mobile media companies explicitly designed for sexual minorities in the contemporary moment has made media culture a major factor in what it feels like to be a queer person. F. Hollis Griffin demonstrates how cities offer a way of thinking about that phenomenon. By examining urban centers in tandem with advertiser-supported newspapers, New Queer Cinema and B-movies, queer-targeted television, and mobile apps, Griffin illustrates how new forms of LGBTQ+ media are less “new” than we often believe. He connects cities and LGBTQ+ media through the experiences they can make available to people, which Griffin articulates as feelings, emotions, and affects. He illuminates how the limitations of these experiences—while not universally accessible, nor necessarily empowering—are often the very reasons why people find them compelling and desirable. “As a guide to emerging queer media of our new century, Hollis Griffin is funny, generous, passionate, and lucid. Whether he’s explaining Grindr’s memes or the gayborhoods of Chicago, cable travel programs or online networks, Griffin discovers how it feels to be queer in the digital age.” —Amy Villarejo, author of Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire “Offers a piercing examination of modern identity politics focused on relationships among new forms of media consumption and marketplaces, urban centers, and the experiences of sexual minorities. . . . Feeling Normal is a must-read for scholars and students in queer studies and communication, media studies, film studies, and sociology.” —Choice

Celebrate feelings in all their shapes and sizes in this New York Times bestselling picture book from the Growing Hearts series! Happiness, sadness, bravery, anger, shyness . . . our hearts can feel so many feelings! Some make us feel as light as a balloon, others as heavy as an elephant. In My Heart explores a full range of emotions, describing how they feel physically, inside, with language that is lyrical but also direct to empower readers to practice articulating and identifying their own emotions. With whimsical illustrations and an irresistible die-cut heart that extends through each spread, this gorgeously packaged and unique feelings book is sure to become a storytime favorite.

»Digital Culture & Society« is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiry into digital media theory. The journal provides a venue for publication for interdisciplinary research approaches, contemporary theory developments and methodological innovation in digital media studies. It invites reflection on how culture unfolds through the use of digital technology, and how it conversely influences the development of digital technology itself. The inaugural issue »Digital Material/ism« presents methodological and theoretical insights into digital materiality and materialism.

How gaming intersects with systems like history, bodies, and code Why do we so compulsively play video games? Might it have something to do with how gaming affects our emotions? In Playing with Feelings, scholar Aubrey Anable applies affect theory to game studies, arguing that video games let us “rehearse” feelings, states, and emotions that give new tones and textures to our everyday lives and interactions with digital devices. Rather than thinking about video games as an escape from reality, Anable demonstrates how video games—their narratives, aesthetics, and histories—have been intimately tied to our emotional landscape since the emergence of digital computers. Looking at a wide variety of video games—including mobile games, indie games, art games, and games that have been traditionally neglected by academia—Anable expands our understanding of the ways in which these games and game studies can participate in feminist and queer interventions in digital media culture. She gives a new account of the touchscreen and intimacy with our mobile devices, asking what it means to touch and be touched by a game. She also examines how games played casually throughout the day create meaningful interludes that give us new ways of relating to work in our lives. And Anable reflects on how games allow us to feel differently about what it means to fail. Playing with Feelings offers provocative arguments for why video games should be seen as the most significant art form of the twenty-first century and gives the humanities passionate, incisive, and daring arguments for why games matter.

As humans charge up the steep slope of technological innovation, digital age media increasingly shapes our perception of everything--even spiritual matters. The next stage of spiritual development may be the product of a digital interface between our own image of the divine, virtual reality technology that produces real perceptions, and with devices that stimulate areas of the brain associated with spiritual experience. This book explores the influence of digital media on spirituality and the impact of the digital environment on our experience of the spiritual world. The author predicts a future in which digital technology and neuroscience will combine to create a new understanding of the divine. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

The book shows how digital-interactive television (digiTV) will affect the relation between the broadcaster and the consumer. Standardization processes, technological paradigms, and application development issues will be discussed. The emerging applications, innovations, and future concepts are described in detail. The triangle: content - end-user - technology will be conceptualized to create a vision and to overview provision of services that will be major innovative elments in the world of digital television. From the technical side, eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based metadata standards are a major element in realizing new innovative concepts in the world of digital, interactive television. This book clearly shows by the introduction of applications and use-scenarios, which conceptual requirements and metadata models are applicable, which metadata subsets are applicable due to resource limitations, which metadata aspects are needed for nonlinear content viewing, etc. The book gives a broad and detailed both visionary and technical overview useful for graduates, engineers, and scientists; and last but not least decision-makers in the broadcasting industry.

With the increase of digital and networked media in everyday life, researchers have increasingly turned their gaze to the symbolic and cultural elements of technologies. From studying online game communities, locative and social media to YouTube and mobile media, ethnographic approaches to digital and networked media have helped to elucidate the dynamic cultural and social dimensions of media practice. The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, and conceptually cutting-edge guide to this emergent and diverse area. Features include: a comprehensive history of computers and digitization in anthropology; exploration of various ethnographic methods in the context of digital tools and network relations; consideration of social networking and communication technologies on a local and global scale; in-depth analyses of different interfaces in ethnography, from mobile technologies to digital archives.