The ever-evolving ways that we interact with each other, our world, and ourselves through technology is a topic as worn as the devices we clutch and carry every day. How did we get here? Drawing from the disciplines of media ecology and media archaeology, as well as bringing fresh perspectives from subcultures of music and skateboarding, The Medium Picture illuminates aspects of technological mediation that have been overlooked along the way. Roy Christopher’s high-tempo, lucid prose shows us how immersion in unmoored technologies of connectivity places us in a world of pure media and redefines who we are, how we are, and what we will be.
About the Author :
ROY CHRISTOPHER is an aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid. That’s where he learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. His books include Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future; Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism; and Post-Self: Journeys beyond the Human Body. He holds a PhD in communication studies from the University of Texas at Austin and writes regularly at roychristopher.com.
Review :
Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.
Like a skateboarder repurposing the utilitarian textures of the urban terrain for sport, Roy Christopher reclaims the content and technologies of the media environment as a landscape to be navigated and explored. The Medium Picture is both a highly personal yet revelatory chronicle of a decades-long encounter with mediated popular culture.
A synthesis of theory and thesis, research and personal recollection, The Medium Picture is a work of rangy intelligence and wandering curiosity. Thought-provoking and a pleasure to read.
Immersed in the contemporary digital culture he grew up with as a teenager, Roy Christopher is old enough to recall vinyl, punk, and zines — social media before TikTok and smartphones. The Medium Picture deftly illuminates the connections between post-punk music critique, the increasing virtualization of culture, the history of formal media theory, the liminal zones of analog versus digital, pop versus high culture, capitalism versus anarchy. It’s the kind of book that makes you stop and think and scribble in the margins.
Brilliant, pathbreaking, palpable insights…Worthy of McLuhan.
If the medium is the message, then today’s mediascape is a constant digital missive, reminding us that we are trapped together in a seven-level underworld metaverse mall. Who better to help guide us through this neo-Dantesque pixel inferno than Roy Christopher—one part Virgil, one part Debord, and at least one part his mischievous and brilliant self.
Through music, generational habits, pre- and post-internet cultures, and a multitude of ‘cognitive entanglements’, this book flows with grace across different scales of mediation and affect.
The Medium Picture probes many of the questions and desires that we feel as people and may not have words for. The extremely clever title gives a very accurate idea of what the book is about — a play on words that folds in on itself from multiple angles. . . . . Importantly, at only 162 pages, Christopher makes a seemingly intimidating topic appear tackleable and packs a lot into his punch. Perhaps the best thing The Medium Picture does, though, is recognize that it is a piece of a larger whole — a very important and often forgotten thing for cultural theory to do. For that and much more, it is worth your read.
Roy Christopher wields criticism as deftly as he creates connections, proving himself as much an heir to Mark Fisher as he is to Marshall McLuhan. Part music-fan memoir, part DIY-media manifesto, The Medium Picture is an impassioned instance of post-punk media theory.”
