Digital Futures For Cultural And Media Studies

An ambitious rendering of the digital future from a pioneer of media and cultural studies, a wise and witty take on a changing field, and our orientation to it Investigates the uses of multimedia by creative and productive citizen-consumers to provide new theories of communication that accommodate social media, participatory action, and user-creativity Leads the way for new interdisciplinary engagement with systems thinking, complexity and evolutionary sciences, and the convergence of cultural and economic values Analyzes the historical uses of multimedia from print, through broadcasting to the internet Combines conceptual innovation with historical erudition to present a high-level synthesis of ideas and detailed analysis of emergent forms and practices Features an international focus and global reach to provide a basis for students and researchers seeking broader perspectives

An indispensable resource for instructors and students in digital studies programs, Critical Digital Studies is a comprehensive, creative, and fascinating look at a digital culture that is struggling to be born, survive, and flourish."--Publisher description.

Digital, visual media are found in most aspects of everyday life, from workplaces to household devices - computer and digital television screens, appliances such as refrigerators and home assistants, and applications for social media and gaming. Each technologically enabled opportunity brings an increasingly sophisticated language with the act of pursuing the intrasensorial ways of perceiving the world around us - through touch, movement, sound and vision - that is the heart of screen media use and audience engagement with digital artifacts. Drawing on digital media's currently evolving transformation and transforming capacity this book builds a story of the multiple processes in robotics and AI, virtual reality, creative image and sound production, the representation of data and creative practice. Issues around commodification, identity, identification, and political economy are critically examined for the emerging and affecting encounters and perceptions that are brought to bear.

Everything you need to know about new media in one accessible, easy to navigate volume! From Facebook to the iPhone, from YouTube to Wikipedia, from Grand Theft Auto to Second Life - this book explores new media’s most important issues and debates in an accessible and engaging text for newcomers to the field. With technological change continuing to unfold at an incredible rate, Digital Cultures rounds-up major events in the media’s recent past to help develop a clear understanding of the theoretical and practical debates that surround this emerging discipline. It addresses issues such as: What is new media? How is new media changing our lives? Is new media having a positive or negative effect on culture and human communication? Each chapter contains case studies which provide an interesting and lively balance between the well-trodden and the newly emerging themes in the field. Topics covered include digital television, digital cinema, gaming, digital democracy, mobile phones, the World Wide Web, digital news, online social networking, music and multimedia, virtual communities and the digital divide. Digital Cultures is an essential introductory guide for all media and communication studies students, as well as those with a general interest in new media and its impact on the world around us.

"The most ambitious, thoughtful and internationally aware assessment to date of the creative economy. Defining creativity as the production of newness in complex, adaptive systems, the authors make the case that together the creative economy, along with other cultural outputs, represent a planet-wide innovation capability which marks an epochal turn in human affairs." – Ian Hargreaves, CBE, Professor of Digital Economy, Cardiff University Creativity, new ideas and innovation - and with them the growth of knowledge - have spilled out of the lab, studio and factory into the street, scene, and social media. Now, everyday life is productive, everyone is creative, and new ideas can come from anywhere around the world. Instead of confining cultural expression to talented artists and expert professionals, this book investigates creative new ideas from everyone. Instead of confining the ‘creative industries’ to one sector of the economy and one type of productivity, this book extends the idea of creative innovation to everything. Instead of confining the growth of knowledge to wealthy countries or markets, this book looks for it in developing and emergent countries, everywhere. The productivity of creativity can now be seen as a global phenomenon. It demands a systems-based and dynamic mode of explanation. Creative Economy and Culture pursues the conceptual, historical, practical, critical and educational issues and implications. It looks at conceptual challenges, the forces and dynamics of change, and prospects for the future of creative work at planetary scale. It is essential reading for upper level students and researchers of the creative and cultural industries across media and cultural studies, communication and sociology.

Libraries have been traditionally associated with managing physical resources, however with the rise of the Internet and the rapid expansion of electronic communication media, information gathering, storage and transmission have presented fresh challenges to those responsible for preserving the cultural memory of society. This book examines the strategic issues involved in realizing a digital future for libraries in the information age. It looks at how librarians and information professionals can locate the electronic resources most relevant to the needs of their users, integrate these resources into the infrastructure of their institutions, manage the necessary technology and anticipate future trends in the digital age. Topics covered include: the effect of information and communications in the digital world upon libraries and information organizations the role of the library and the librarian in the digital age economic factors, cultural resource management, technology impact, and knowledge management in the digital library environment preservation of material culture through digitization and preservation of digital objects case studies demonstrating the digital information impact upon national, academic, public and transnational organizations worldwide. Readership: An indispensable guide for all information professionals - including librarians, library and information managers and archivists - wanting to keep abreast of developments in communications technologies, manage change in the library environment, and implement new modes and methods of resource management. It will also be of interest to students on library and information studies courses.

"In the decades it takes to bring up a child, parents face challenges that are both helped and hindered by the fact that they are living through a period of unprecedented digital innovation. Drawing on extensive research with diverse parents, this book reveals how digital technologies give personal and political parenting struggles a distinctive character, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent, or support. The book reveals the pincer movement of parenting in late modernity. Parents are both more burdened with responsibilities and charged with respecting the agency of their child-leaving much to negotiate in today's "democratic" families. The book charts how parents now often enact authority and values through digital technologies-as "screen time," games, or social media become ways of both being together and setting boundaries. The authors show how digital technologies introduce both valued opportunities and new sources of risk. To light their way, parents comb through the hazy memories of their own childhoods and look toward varied imagined futures. This results in deeply diverse parenting in the present, as parents move between embracing, resisting, or balancing the role of technology in their own and their children's lives. This book moves beyond the panicky headlines to offer a deeply researched exploration of what it means to parent in a period of significant social and technological change. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative research in the United Kingdom, the book offers conclusions and insights relevant to parents, policymakers, educators, and researchers everywhere"--

How is labour changing in the age of computers, the Internet, and "social media" such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter? In Digital Labour and Karl Marx, Christian Fuchs attempts to answer that question, crafting a systematic critical theorisation of labour as performed in the capitalist ICT industry. Relying on a range of global case studies--from unpaid social media prosumers or Chinese hardware assemblers at Foxconn to miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo--Fuchs sheds light on the labour costs of digital media, examining the way ICT corporations exploit human labour and the impact of this exploitation on the lives, bodies, and minds of workers.