Unruly Media

Unruly Media is the first book to account for the current audiovisual landscape across media and platform. It includes new theoretical models and close readings of current media as well as the oeuvre of popular and influential directors.

Unruly Media argues that we are the crest of a new international style in which sonic and visual parameters become heightened and accelerated. This audiovisual turn calls for new forms of attention. Post-classical cinema, with its multi-plot narratives and flashy style, fragments under the influence of audiovisual numbers and music-video-like sync. Music video becomes more than a way of selling songs. YouTube's brief, low-res clips encompass many forms and foreground reiteration, graphic values and affective intensity. These three media are riven by one another: a trajectory from YouTube through music video to the new digital cinema reveals commonalities, especially in the realms of rhythm, texture and form. This is the first book to account for the current audiovisual landscape across medium and platform, and it demonstrates that attending equally to soundtrack and image reveals how these media work and how they both mirror and shape our experience.

Producing New and Digital Media is your guide to understanding new media, diving deep into topics such as cultural and social impacts of the web, the importance of digital literacy, and creating in an online environment. It features an introductory, hands-on approach to creating user-generated content, coding, cultivating an online brand, and storytelling in new and digital media. This book is accompanied by a companion website—designed to aid students and professors alike—that features chapter-related questions, links to resources, and lecture slides. In showing you how to navigate the world of digital media and also complete digital tasks, this book not only teaches you how to use the web, but understand why you use it. KEY FEATURES For students- a companion site that features research resources and links for further investigation For instructors- a companion site that features lecture slides, a sample syllabus, and an Instructor’s Manual. Features a unique approach that covers media studies aspects with production and design tutorials. Covers up-to-date forms of communication on the web such as memes, viral videos, social media, and more pervasive types of online languages.

What forces bring ordinary people together in public to make their voices heard? What means do they use to break through impediments to democratic participation? Unruly Rhetorics is a collection of essays from scholars in rhetoric, communication, and writing studies inquiring into conditions for activism, political protest, and public assembly. An introduction drawing on Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler explores the conditions under which civil discourse cannot adequately redress suffering or injustice. The essays offer analyses of “unruliness” in case studies from both twenty-first-century and historical sites of social-justice protest. The collection concludes with an afterword highlighting and inviting further exploration of the ethical, political, and pedagogical questions unruly rhetorics raise. Examining multiple modes of expression – embodied, print, digital, and sonic – Unruly Rhetorics points to the possibility that unruliness, more than just one of many rhetorical strategies within political activity, is constitutive of the political itself.

The first critical study of personal narrative by women with disabilities, Unruly Bodies examines how contemporary writers use life writing to challenge cultural stereotypes about disability, gender, embodiment, and identity. Combining the analyses of disability and feminist theories, Susannah Mintz discusses the work of eight American autobiographers: Nancy Mairs, Lucy Grealy, Georgina Kleege, Connie Panzarino, Eli Clare, Anne Finger, Denise Sherer Jacobson, and May Sarton. Mintz shows that by refusing inspirational rhetoric or triumph-over-adversity narrative patterns, these authors insist on their disabilities as a core--but not diminishing--aspect of identity. They offer candid portrayals of shame and painful medical procedures, struggles for the right to work or to parent, the inventive joys of disabled sex, the support and the hostility of family, and the losses and rewards of aging. Mintz demonstrates how these unconventional stories challenge feminist idealizations of independence and self-control and expand the parameters of what counts as a life worthy of both narration and political activism. Unruly Bodies also suggests that atypical life stories can redefine the relation between embodiment and identity generally.

Unruly Audience explores grassroots appropriations of familiar media texts from film, television, stand-up comedy, popular music, advertising, and tourism. Case studies probe the complex relationship between folklore and media, with particular attention to the dynamics of production and reception. Greg Kelley examines how “folk interventions” challenge institutional media with active—often public—social engagement. Drawing on a diverse range of examples—popular music parodies of “The Colonel Bogey March,” jokes about Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, touristic performance at Jamaica’s haunted Rose Hall, internet memes about NBC’s The Office, children’s parodies of commercials, and jokes about joking—Kelley demonstrates how active audiences mobilize folklore to disrupt dominant modes of media discourse. With materials both historical and contemporary and compiled from print, internet archives, and original fieldwork, Kelley’s audience-centered analysis demonstrates that producers of media are not the sole arbiters of meaning. With folklore as an important tool, unruly audiences refashion mediated expression so that the material becomes more relevant to their own circumstances. Unruly Audience foregrounds the fluid interplay between media production and audience reception and between forces of cultural domination and cultural resistance, bringing new analytical insights to familiar folk practices. This carefully crafted book will speak to students and scholars in folklore, popular culture, and media studies in multidisciplinary ways.

Sounding Emerging Media details a practice-based approach to sonic art and electroacoustic composition, drawing on methodologies inspired by the production of electronic literature, and game development. Using the structural concepts identified by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the book is based around ideas related to labels such as Assemblage, Strata, Smooth and Striated Space, Temporal Space and, The Fold. The processes employed to undertake this research involved the creation of original texts, the development of frameworks for improvisation, the use of recordings within the process and implementation of techniques drawn from the practices of electroacoustic composition, and the use of ideas borrowed from electronic literature, publishing and game development. The results have helped to shape a compositional style which draws on these processes individually or collectively, drawing on practice often seen in game development, visual scores and composition using techniques found in electroacoustic music. Providing a journey through the landscape of emerging digital media, Sounding Emerging Media envisages a world where the composer/user/listener all become part of a continuum of collective artistry. This book is the ideal guide to the history and creation of audio for innovative digital media formats and represents crucial reading for both students and practitioners, from aspiring composers to experienced professionals.

Music videos promote popular artists in cultural forms that circulate widely across social media networks. With the advent of YouTube in 2005 and the proliferation of handheld technologies and social networking sites, the music video has become available to millions worldwide, and continues to serve as a fertile platform for the debate of issues and themes in popular culture. This volume of essays serves as a foundational handbook for the study and interpretation of the popular music video, with the specific aim of examining the industry contexts, cultural concepts, and aesthetic materials that videos rely upon in order to be both intelligible and meaningful. Easily accessible to viewers in everyday life, music videos offer profound cultural interventions and negotiations while traversing a range of media forms. From a variety of unique perspectives, the contributors to this volume undertake discussions that open up new avenues for exploring the creative changes and developments in music video production. With chapters that address music video authorship, distribution, cultural representations, mediations, aesthetics, and discourses, this study signals a major initiative to provide a deeper understanding of the intersecting and interdisciplinary approaches that are invoked in the analysis of this popular and influential musical form.