Mediamorphosis

This book is about technological change within human communication and the media. However, it is not technical but an overview and evaluation of new communication technologies. Roger Fidler demystifies emerging media technologies and provides a structure for understanding their potential influences on the popular forms of mainstream media such as newspapers, magazines, television and radio.

Digital technologies have transformed the way many creative works are generated, disseminated and used. They have made cultural products more accessible, challenged established business models and the copyright system, and blurred the boundary between

This book is about technological change within human communication and the media. However, it is not technical but an overview and evaluation of new communication technologies. Roger Fidler demystifies emerging media technologies and provides a structure for understanding their potential influences on the popular forms of mainstream media such as newspapers, magazines, television and radio.

Why did jazz become a dominant popular music genre in the 1920s and rock 'n' roll in the 1950s? Why did heavy metal, punk rock and hiphop find their way from sub-cultures to the established music industry? What are the effects of new communication technologies and the Internet on the creation of music in the early 21st century? These and other questions are answered by Peter Tschmuck through an integrated model of creativity and innovation that is based on an international history of music industry since Thomas A. Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. Thus, the history of the music industry is described in full detail. By discussing the historic process of music production, distribution and reception the author highlights several revolutions in the music industry that were caused by the inference of aesthetic, technological, legal, economic, social and political processes of change. On the basis of an integrated model of creativity and innovation, an explanation is given on how the processes and structures of the present music industry will be altered by the ongoing digital revolution, which totally changed the value-added network of the production, dissemination and use of music. For the second edition, the author has reworked chapter 9 in order to include all the developments which shaped the music industry in the first decade of the 21st century – from Napster to cloud-based music services and even beyond.

The idea of a visual manifestation of the work of Franz Kafka was denied by many—first and foremost by Kafka himself, who famously urged his publisher to avoid an image of an insect on the cover of Metamorphosis. Be that as it may, it is unlikely that such a central progenitor of twentieth-century art and thought as Kafka can be fully understood without reference to the revolutionary artistic medium of his century: cinema. Mediamorphosis compiles articles by some of today's leading forces in the scholarship of Kafka as well as film studies to provide a thorough investigation of the reciprocal relations between Kafka's work and the cinematic medium. The volume approaches the theoretical integration of Kafka and cinema via such issues as the cinematic qualities in Kafka's prose and the possibility of a visual manifestation of the Kafkaesque. Alongside these debates, the book investigates the capacity of cinema to incorporate and express the unique qualities of a Kafkaesque world through an analysis of cinematic adaptations of Kafka's prose, such as Michael Haneke's The Castle (1997) and Straub-Huillet's Class Relations (1984), as well as films that carry a more subtle relation to Kafka's oeuvre, such as the cinematic works of David Cronenberg, the films of the Coen brothers, Chris Marker's "film-essay," Charlie Chaplin's tramp, and others.

In the present time electronic media are the most powerful factory that influence music culture. They change social functions of music, they affect musical behavior, music taste and aesthetic ideals of the society. The power of film, television and other media is based on the fact that the media trigger complex audiovisual perceptions or they determine the ways of how music evokes extra-musical imaginations. Audiovisual Media and Music Culture struggles to systematize and classify the basic categories of audiovisual communication, it explains music in media as a category of space and time, reveals the laws of the music culture development, the advantages and disadvantages of civilization trends and it also separates value constants from transition episodes.

This book surveys the African media industry, examining various sections of the media at the elite level. Drawing on contributors from diverse regions and media and communication disciplines, the book provides definitive analyses of the switch from analogue to digital broadcasting in select African countries. This timely and relevant collection of essays covers trending topics in communication and media studies, as scholars globally continue to examine the impact of digital technology on media practice, training, and education. The contributors offer rich perspectives on crucial issues, blending practice and scholarship as former media practitioners and academics come together to fill a major gap in media practice and education in Africa. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of globalization and African media.

Music sociology occupies a special position in the social and cultural sciences. The terminology alone – in German it is ‘Musiksoziologie’ and not ‘Soziologie der Musik’ – indicates many possible approaches: Is ‘music sociology’ a subdiscipline within sociology or musicology? Or is it a discipline on its own, espousing significant differences from sociology and musicology alike? On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the Department of Music Sociology at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna – probably the only one in the world to bear the name as a separate department – decided to clarify the state of music sociology. Some of the world’s most prominent representatives of the discipline were invited to participate in this project and present their own viewpoints on the various approaches to music sociology. Their contributions address the particular research objects of music sociology (institutions of musical life; production, distribution and consumption of music; music-making; ‘works’, genres and repertoires; etc.) as well as the different methods of research (stock-taking, surveys, interviews, music analysis, biographical research, etc.).