About the Book
Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena—images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies—mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication. Building on the work of materialist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Henri Lefebvre, the essays collected here examine the materiality of discourse itself and the constitutive force of communication in the production of the real.
Communication Matters presents original work that rethinks communication as material and situates materialist approaches to communication within the broader "materiality turn" emerging in the humanities and social sciences.
This collection will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in Media, Communication Studies, and Rhetoric.
The book includes images of the digital media installations of Francesca Talenti, Professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Table of Contents:
Part I Orientations Media/Materiality Introduction The Materiality of Communication, Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley Chapter 1. Media, Materiality, and the Human: A Conversation with N. Katherine Hayles, N. Katherine Hayles Chapter 2. Becoming Mollusk: A conversation with John Durham Peters about Media, Materiality, and Matters of History, John Durham Peters Part II Communication Time/Space Chapter 3. Ubiquitous Sensibility, Marc Hansen Chapter 4. It Changes Space and Time! Introducing Power-Chronography, Sarah Sharma Chapter 5. Zeroing In: Overhead Imagery, Infrastructure Ruins, and Datalands in Afghanistan and Iraq, Lisa Parks Chapter 6. Rhetoric, Materiality, and U.S. Western Front Commemoration, Carole Blair, V. William Balthrop, and Neil Michel Chapter 7. Materiality and Urban Communication: The Rhetoric of Communicative Spaces, Victoria Gallagher, Kenneth Zagacki, and Kelly Norris Martin Chapter 8.The Birth of the "Neoliberal" City and its Media, James Hay Part III Communication Assemblages/Networks Chapter 9. Beyond Transmission, Modes, and Media, Jennifer Daryl Slack Chapter 10. Attention and Assemblage in the Clickable World, J. Macgregor Wise Chapter 11. The Documentality of Mme Briet’s Antelope, Bernd Frohmann Chapter 12. Assemblages, Networks, Subjects: A Materialist Approach to the Production of Social Space, Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, Tabita Moreno, and Daniel M. Sutko Chapter 13. Vitalism, Animality, and the Material Grounds of Rhetoric, Byron Hawk Chapter 14. 8 Mile: Networked Decision Making, Jeff Rice Chapter 15. Lessons form the YMCA: The Material Rhetoric of Criticism, Rhetorical Interpretation and Pastoral Power, Ronald Walter Greene Part IV Communication Mobility/Immobility Chapter 16. Materializing US-Caribbean Borders: Airports as Technologies of Communication, Coordination and Control, Mimi Sheller Chapter 17. Publicized Privacy: Social Networking and the Compulsive Search for Limits, Joshua Gunn and John Sloop Chapter 18. Virtual Mobility: The Sign/Body of Pure Information, Ken Hillis Chapter 19. Location-aware technologies: Control and privacy in hybrid spaces, Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith Chapter 20. Flow and Mobile Media: Broadcast Fixity to Digital Fluidity, Kathleen Oswald and Jeremy Packer
