Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology(MediaMatters)

Three decades of societal and cultural alignment of new media have yielded a host of innovations, trials, and problems, accompanied by versatile popular and academic discourse. New Media Studies crystallized internationally into an established academic discipline, and this begs the question: where do we stand now? Which new questions are emerging now that new media are being taken for granted, and which riddles are still unsolved? Is contemporary digital culture indeed all about 'you', the participating user, or do we still not really understand the digital machinery and how this constitutes us as 'you'? The contributors to the present book, all employed in teaching and researching new media and digital culture, assembled their 'digital material' into an anthology, covering issues ranging from desktop metaphors to Web 2.0 ecosystems, from touch screens to blogging and e-learning, from role-playing games and cybergothic music to wireless dreams. Together the contributions provide a showcase of current research in the field, from what may be called a 'digital-materialist' perspective. A compelling study of the often controversial role and meaning of the new media and digital cultures in contemporary society.

Table of Contents:
Introduction, Processor, Serious games from an apparatus perspective, Empower yourself, defend freedom!, Formatted spaces of participation, Digital objects in e-learning environments, Memory, The vanishing points of mobile communication, The work of art in the age of digital recombination, The design of world citizenship, Network, Moving beyond the artefact, Participation inside?, Challenging the magic circle, Renaissance now!, Screen, What you get is what you see, The pervasive interface, Grasping the screen, Terra incognita, Keyboard, Conceptualizing forums and blogs as public sphere, Interfacing by material metaphors, Hidden practice, About the authors, Index

About the Author :
Ann-Sophie Lehmann is professor for art history & material culture at the University of Groningen. Her research has a process-based, transhistorical approach and shows how materials, tools, and practices partake in the meaning making of art.|Joost Raessens is Full Professor and Chair of Media Theory at the Faculty of Humanities of Utrecht University, the Netherlands.|Mirko Tobias Schäfer is Associate Professor of AI, Data & Society at Utrecht University’s research area 'Governing the Digital Society' and the Department for Information and Computing Sciences. Mirko is co-founder and Sciences lead of the Data School. He studies the datafication of public management and engages in the development of responsible and accountable AI and data practices. Sybille Lammes is Full Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at The Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) at Leiden University. She has been a visiting Senior Research Fellow at The University of Manchester, and has worked as a researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, as well as the media studies departments of Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam. Her background is in media studies and play studies, which she has always approached from an interdisciplinary angle, including cultural studies, science and technology studies, postcolonial studies, and critical geography. She is co-editor of >Playful identities: The ludification of digital media cultures> (2015), >Mapping time> (Manchester University Press 2018; forthcoming) and >The Routledge handbook of interdisciplinary research methods> (Routledge 2018; forthcoming). She is an ERC laureate and has been the PI of numerous research projects.