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. ContributorsPablo 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 |
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