Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society

by Tarleton Gillespie (Editor), Pablo J. Boczkowski (Editor), Kirsten A. Foot (Editor)

Overview

Scholars from communication and media studies join those from science and technology studies to examine media technologies as complex, sociomaterial phenomena.

In recent years, scholarship around media technologies has finally shed the assumption that these technologies are separate from and powerfully determining of social life, looking at them instead as produced by and embedded in distinct social, cultural, and political practices. Communication and media scholars have increasingly taken theoretical perspectives originating in science and technology studies (STS), while some STS scholars interested in information technologies have linked their research to media studies inquiries into the symbolic dimensions of these tools. In this volume, scholars from both fields come together to advance this view of media technologies as complex sociomaterial phenomena.

The contributors first address the relationship between materiality and mediation, considering such topics as the lived realities of network infrastructure. The contributors then highlight media technologies as always in motion, held together through the minute, unobserved work of many, including efforts to keep these technologies alive.

Contributors
Pablo J. Boczkowski, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Finn Brunton, Gabriella Coleman, Gregory J. Downey, Kirsten A. Foot, Tarleton Gillespie, Steven J. Jackson, Christopher M. Kelty, Leah A. Lievrouw, Sonia Livingstone, Ignacio Siles, Jonathan Sterne, Lucy Suchman, Fred Turner

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262319478
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	01/17/2014
Series:	Inside Technology
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	344
File size:	4 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Tarleton Gillespie is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University and the author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (MIT Press).

Pablo J. Boczkowski is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers, coauthor of The News Gap: When the Information Preferences of the Media and the Public Diverge, and coeditor of Remaking the News: Essays on the Future of Journalism Scholarship in the Digital Age (all published by the MIT Press).

Kirsten A. Foot is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, and lead author of Web Campaigning (MIT Press).

Tarleton Gillespie is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University and the author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (MIT Press).

Pablo J. Boczkowski is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers, coauthor of The News Gap: When the Information Preferences of the Media and the Public Diverge, and coeditor of Remaking the News: Essays on the Future of Journalism Scholarship in the Digital Age (all published by the MIT Press).

Kirsten A. Foot is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, and lead author of Web Campaigning (MIT Press).

Pablo J. Boczkowski is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers, coauthor of The News Gap: When the Information Preferences of the Media and the Public Diverge, and coeditor of Remaking the News: Essays on the Future of Journalism Scholarship in the Digital Age (all published by the MIT Press).

Finn Brunton is Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT Press).

Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor and Director of the Evoke Lab at the University of California, Irvine. He is the coauthor (with Susan Leigh Star) of Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences and the author of Memory Practices in the Sciences, both published by the MIT Press.

Tarleton Gillespie is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University and the author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (MIT Press).

Table of Contents

About the Contributors ix

Editors' Acknowledgments xiii

1 Introduction Tarleton Gillespie Pablo J. Boczkowski Kirsten A. Foot 1

I The Materiality of Mediated Knowledge and Expression

2 Materiality and Media in Communication and Technology Studies: An Unfinished Project Leah A. Lievrouw 21

3 Steps Toward Cosmopolitanism in the Study of Media Technologies: Integrating Scholarship on Production, Consumption, Materiality, and Content Pablo J. Boczkowski Ignacio Siles 53

4 Closer to the Metal Finn Brunton Gabriella Coleman 77

5 Emerging Configurations of Knowledge Expression Geoffrey C. Bowker 99

6 "What Do We Want?" "Materiality!" "When Do We Want It?" "Now!" Jonathan Sterne 119

7 Mediations and Their Others Lucy Suchman 129

II The People, Practices, and Promises of Information Networks

8 Making Media Work: Time, Space, Identity, and Labor in the Analysis of Information and Communication Infrastructures Gregory J. Downey 141

9 The Relevance of Algorithms Tarleton Gillespie 167

10 The Fog of Freedom Christopher M. Kelty 195

11 Rethinking Repair Steven J. Jackson 221

12 Identifying the Interests of Digital Users as Audiences, Consumers, Workers, and Publics Sonia Livingstone 241

13 The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Networks Fred Turner 251

References 261

Author Index 309

Subject Index 319