Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production is the first comprehensive study of the latest wave of online news publications. The book investigates the collaborative publishing models of key news Websites, ranging from the worldwide Indymedia network to the massively successful technology news site Slashdot, and further to the multitude of Weblogs that have emerged in recent years. Building on collaborative approaches borrowed from the open source software development community, this book illustrates how gatewatching provides an alternative to gatekeeping and other...

Figures of Fantasy explores the popularization of the idea of the Internet as a -cyberspace- and considers the implications this has for discussions of gender and identity. The book analyzes the standard figures used to conceptualize and explain technology and gender, and traces the ways in which these concepts have served to create the figure of the Internet as a cyberspace a manner of thinking that has come to dominate Internet research internationally, making visible its historicity, limitations, and implications. Figures of Fantasy offers an innovative theoretical approach...

The Cell Phone Reader offers a diverse, eclectic set of essays that examines how this rapidly evolving technology is shaping new media cultures, new forms of identity, and media-centered relationships. The contributors focus on a range of topics, from horror films to hip-hop, from religion to race, and draw examples from across the globe. The Cell Phone Reader provides a road map for both scholars and beginning students to examine the profound social, cultural and international impact of this small device.

The media alters one s experience of the world and, in turn, alters one s relationship to others. This is true of both the book and the screen, but with profoundly different consequences. The omnipresent screen of the early twenty-first century serves as a portal that reconfigures private and public experience in ways that are fundamentally different from print culture. Not only does the screen reveal the complexities of people and places beyond our reach, it alters our phenomenological awareness of space, sound, and motion. The individual experiences the altered duration of the screen, and...

In this groundbreaking book, media and time theorist Robert Hassan looks at the effects of the nexus between neoliberal globalization and the information technology revolution upon the production and dissemination of knowledge in technologically advanced societies. This nexus has created what Hassan calls an -information ecology-, an environment that affects the individual, culture and society in the same dialectical ways as the natural and built environment. Significantly, this information ecology generates its own temporality, that of -network time-, a digitally compressed and accelerated...

This book questions whether technologies are the rational, tangible, scientific, forward-thinking, neutral objects they are so often perceived to be, exploring instead how powerful, mythic ideas about technologies drive our social understanding and our expectations of them. Against a rising tide of information, we encounter significant technological, scientific, and medical advances which promise to create an educated, humane, and equal world. This book explores that promise, deconstructing technologies to conclude that though they do afford us significant and empowering advances, they remain...

Virtual worlds are most often three dimensional locales, where people create virtual personae (called avatars) who come to play, socialize, and work. This edited collection of groundbreaking research on virtual worlds offers a wide-ranging look at the sociology, politics, and communication practices in virtual worlds from a group of scholars in the United States and abroad.

What is the nature of computer games, and what happens when we play them? This book describes human play as a semiotic process and computer game play as a fundamental act of human cognition, or -semiosis-. Offering one of the first fully articulated theories of computer games based on game play rather than game texts, The Nature of Computer Games mounts a serious challenge to literary critics, cultural theorists, and others who might assume computer game play is best understood with reference to preexisting social contexts. David Myers argues that computer game play displays a...

This book has won the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award 2014.

Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has evolved from a niche service to a mass phenomenon; it has become instrumental for everyday communication as well as for political debates, crisis communication, marketing, and cultural participation. But the basic idea behind it has stayed the same: users may post short messages (tweets) of up to 140 characters and follow the updates posted by other users. Drawing on the experience of leading international Twitter researchers from a variety of disciplines and contexts,...