Full Description
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.
Contents
Table of contents - 6 Introduction - 8 Processor - 20 Serious games from an apparatus perspective - 22 Empower yourself, defend freedom! - 36 Formatted spaces of participation - 50 Digital objects in e-learning environments - 66 Memory - 80 The vanishing points of mobile communication - 82 The work of art in the age of digital recombination - 96 The design of world citizenship - 108 Network - 134 Moving beyond the artefact - 136 Participation inside? - 148 Challenging the magic circle - 160 Renaissance now! - 174 Screen - 186 What you get is what you see - 188 The pervasive interface - 200 Grasping the screen - 210 Terra incognita - 224 Keyboard - 238 Conceptualizing forums and blogs as public sphere - 240 Interfacing by material metaphors - 254 Hidden practice - 268 About the authors - 284 Index - 286
