New Books In Communications

In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (Duke UP, 20

How abstract design decisions in 2D platform games create rich worlds of meaning for players. Since the 1980s, 2D platform games have captivated their audiences. Whether the player scrambles up the ladders in Donkey Kong or leaps atop an impossibly tall pipe in Super Mario Bros., this deceptively simple visual language has persisted in our cultural imagination of video games. In Run and Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer (MIT Press, 2024), Peter McDonald surveys the legacy of 2D platform games and examines how abstract and formal design choices have kept players playing. McDonald argues that there is a rich layer of meaning underneath, say, the quality of an avatar’s movement, the pacing and rhythm of level design, the personalities expressed by different enemies, and the emotion elicited by collecting a coin. To understand these games, McDonald draws on technical discussions by game designers as well as theoretical work about the nature of signs from structuralist semiotics. Interspersed throughout are d

The Graphic User Interface, or GUI, is the adhesive centre of today’s screen entertainment web. From films and television to apps and videogames, it holds together a multitude of media and shapes the way they are accessed, organised, created, consumed, and manipulated. However, it does not do so without leaving viscous traces, and Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nick Jones examines this residue and its consequences, revealing how the GUI exerts a powerful influence on contemporary media. Focusing on aesthetics and adopting a media agnostic approach, Dr. Jones explores cinema, streaming platforms, television, user-generated content, videogames, apps, virtual reality, VFX, design software, and more in order to show how they cross-pollinate with one another and with our desktop interfaces. The result is a new approach for analysing convergent media in the digital era. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming b

Long before internet archives and the anytime, anywhere convenience of streaming, people collected, traded, and shared radio and television content via informal networks that crisscrossed transnational boundaries. Eleanor Patterson’s fascinating cultural history explores the distribution of radio and TV tapes from the 1960s through the 1980s. Looking at bootlegging against the backdrop of mass media’s formative years, Patterson delves into some of the major subcultures of the era. Old-time radio aficionados felt the impact of inexpensive audio recording equipment and the controversies surrounding programs like Amos ‘n’ Andy. Bootlegging communities devoted to buddy cop TV shows like Starsky and Hutch allowed women to articulate female pleasure and sexuality while Star Trek videos in Australia inspired a grassroots subculture built around community viewings of episodes. Tape trading also had a profound influence on creating an intellectual pro wrestling fandom that aided wrestling’s growth into an internationa

Infographics and data visualization are ubiquitous in our everyday media diet, particularly in news—in print newspapers, on television news, and online. It has been argued that infographics are changing what it means to be literate in the twenty-first century—and even that they harmonize uniquely with human cognition. In this first serious exploration of the subject, Murray Dick traces the cultural evolution of the infographic, examining its use in news—and resistance to its use—from eighteenth-century print culture to today's data journalism. He identifies six historical phases of infographics in popular culture: the proto-infographic, the classical, the improving, the commercial, the ideological, and the professional. In The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications (MIT Press, 2020), Dick describes the emergence of infographic forms within a wider history of journalism, culture, and communications, focusing his analysis on the UK. He considers their use in the partisan British jour

In Digital Islamophobia: Tracking a Far-Right Crisis (De Gruyter, 2023), Emily Lynell Edwards explores this virtual and vicious threat, analyzing how these networks grow, develop, and circulate Islamophobic hate-speech on Twitter. Edwards details how far-right discourse is not merely national, or even transatlantic, but increasingly transnationalized among American, German, as well as Indian and Nigerian digital networks. By tracking and tracing the contours of these far-right digital communities on Twitter and analyzing the content of their conversations, Digital Islamophobia provides policy-makers, researchers, and scholars with a potential road-map to stop them. Emily Lynell Edwards is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Educational Technologist at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Or

How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race (U California Press, 2023) examines the programming practices at commercial radio stations in the 1980s and early 1990s to uncover how the radio industry facilitated hip hop's introduction into the musical mainstream. Constructed primarily by the Top 40 radio format, the musical mainstream featured mostly white artists for mostly white audiences. With the introduction of hip hop to these programs, the radio industry was fundamentally altered, as stations struggled to incorporate the genre's diverse audience. At the same time, as artists negotiated expanding audiences and industry pressure to make songs fit within the confines of radio formats, the sound of hip hop changed. Drawing from archival research, Amy Coddington shows how the racial structuring of the radio industry influenced the way hip hop was sold to the American public, and how the genre's growing popularity transformed ideas about who constitutes the mainstream. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi

Can brands really support positive social change? In Big Brands are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture (U California Press, 2024), Francesca Sobande, a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Studies at Cardiff University explores this question by considering the morality of contemporary brands in contemporary, digitial, culture. The book offers a rich set of case studies, ranging from the ways corporations co-opt social justice campaigns and how nations brand themselves, through to influencers, music festivals, and high end television. A significant contribution to both the theory and practice of branding and marketing, the book will be of interest across social sciences, business, and humanities, as well as anyone interested in the role of branding in modern life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

With comics franchises getting turned into multi-billion dollar revenue opportunities and consumer technology companies dominating daily headlines — the trappings of “geekdom” have made their way into the global mainstream over the past few days. As part of this trend, Japanese-style anime has also gained immense transnational popularity, arguably becoming part of the “new cool”. It’s against this backdrop that Jinying Li dives into the sociocultural landscape of anime with her book Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: Geek, Otaku, Zhai (University of Minnesota Press, March 2024). However, instead of diving into the “Japaneseness” of anime and otaku culture, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures helps frame anime within a more globalized sense of “geekdom” — especially with the rise of post-80s millennial zhai in China’s cultural and economic spheres. Li is an Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Her research and teaching focuses on media theory, animation, and digital culture in East Asia. She is

In Comedy Book:: How Comedy Conquered Culture–and the Magic That Makes It Work (FSG, 2023), Jesse David Fox—the country’s most definitive voice in comedy criticism and someone who, in his own words, enjoys comedy “maybe more than anyone on this planet”—tackles everything you need to know about comedy, an art form that has been under-considered throughout its history, even as it has ascended as a cultural force. Weaving together history and analysis, Fox unravels the genre’s political legacy through an ode to Jon Stewart, interrogates the divide between highbrow and lowbrow via Adam Sandler, and unpacks how marginalized comics create spaces for their communities. Along the way, Fox covers topics ranging from comedy in the age of political correctness and Will Smith’s slap, to the right wing’s relationship with comedy, to comedy’s ability to heal in the wake of tragedy. With memorable cameos from Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, John Mulaney, Ali Wong, Kate Berlant, and countless others, Comedy Book is an eye-op

Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities (Routledge, 2023) explores the relationship between avatar and gamer in the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft, to examine notions of entangled subjectivity, affects, and embodiments – what it means and how it feels to be posthuman. With a focus on posthuman subjectivity, Wilde considers how we can begin to articulate ourselves when the boundary between self and other is unclear. Drawing on fieldnotes of her own gameplay experiences, the author analyses how subjectivity is formed in ways that defy a single individual notion of “self”, and explores how different practices, feelings, and societal understandings can disrupt strict binaries and emphasise our posthumanism. She interrogates if one can speak of an “I” in the face of posthuman multiplicity, before exploring different analytical themes, beginning with how acting theories might be posthumanised and articulate the relationship between avatar and gamer. She then

Lee Gutkind is the founder of the literary magazine, Creative Nonfiction. He’s edited or authored over 30 books during his time on the faculty of, first, the University of Pittsburgh and, more recently, Arizona State University. His latest book is The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne’er-do-wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction (Yale UP, 2024). This episode encapsulates the journey that Lee Gutkind has made, as a self-confessed former hippie motorcyclist who not only “fought” his way into academia but helped revitalize the essay genre along the way. When Gutkind began his Creative Nonfiction magazine in 1994, maybe two dozen creative writing programs existed. Today, there are over 200 such programs around the world, and essays have become well-accepted. As Gutkind recounts, back in the day the non-beige nature of New Journalism was the driving force in style and get-out-into-the-world subject matter. Today, a previous all but all-male preserve is driven more by

The ideal of ‘conversation’ recurs in modern thought as a symbol and practice central to ethics, democratic politics, and thinking itself. Interweaving readings of fiction and philosophy in a ‘conversational’ style inspired by Stanley Cavell, Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation (Edinburgh UP, 2023) clarifies this lofty yet vague ideal, while developing a revitalizing model for interdisciplinary literary studies. It argues that conversation is key to exemplary responses to sceptical doubt in ordinary language and political philosophy – where scepticism threatens ethics and democratic politics – and in works of British fiction spanning from Jane Austen through Ali Smith. It shows that for these writers, conversation can shift attention from metaphysical doubts regarding our capacity to know ‘reality’ and other people, to ethical, democratic, and aesthetic action. The book moreover proposes – and models – ‘conversational criticism’ as a framework linking literary studies to broader political and et

A cylinder of baked graphite and clay in a wood case, the pencil creates as it is being destroyed. To love a pencil is to use it, to sharpen it, and to essentially destroy it. Pencils were used to sketch civilization's greatest works of art. Pencils were there marking the choices in the earliest democratic elections. Even when used haphazardly to mark out where a saw's blade should make a cut, a pencil is creating. Pencil offers a deep look at this common, almost ubiquitous, object. Pencils are a simple device that are deceptively difficult to manufacture. At a time when many use cellphones as banking branches and instructors reach students online throughout the world, pencil use has not waned, with tens of millions being made and used annually. In Pencil (Bloomsbury, 2024) Carol Beggy sketches out how the lowly pencil is still a mighty useful tool. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and im

Shortly after its introduction, photography transformed the ways Americans made political arguments using visual images. In the mid-19th century, photographs became key tools in debates surrounding slavery. Yet, photographs were used in interesting and sometimes surprising ways by a range of actors. Matthew Fox-Amato, an Assistant Professor at the University of Idaho, examines the role of photography in the politics of slavery during the 19th century and the important legacies of those uses on later visual politics in his new book, Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (Oxford University Press, 2019). The book examines the use of photographs by slaves, abolitionists, slaveholders, and Union soldiers to explore the rich complexities of the visual politics of the moment. He also considers the legacies of this use of the new medium. In this episode of the podcast, Fox-Amato discusses the ways these various groups used photography for individual purposes

Michael Johnston's The Middle English Book: Scribes and Readers, 1350-1500 (Oxford UP, 2023) addresses a series of questions about the copying and circulation of literature in late medieval England: How do we make sense of the variety of manuscripts surviving from this period? Who copied and disseminated these diverse manuscripts? Who read the literary texts that they transmit? And what was the relationship between those copying literature and those reading it? To answer these questions, this book examines 202 literary manuscripts from the period 1350 to 1500. First, this study suggests that most surviving manuscripts fall into four categories, depending on the proximity and relationship of that manuscript's scribes and readers. But beyond proposing these new categories, this book also looks at the history of writing practices, and demonstrates the ubiquity of bureaucracies within late medieval England.  As a result, The Middle English Book argues that literary production was a decentered affair, one that too

In Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024), Jacob Ward explains why the privatization of British Telecom signaled a pivotal moment in the rise of neoliberalism, and how it was shaped by the longer development and digitalization of Britain’s telecommunications infrastructure.  When Margaret Thatcher sold British Telecom for £3.6 billion in 1984, it became not only, at the time, the largest stock flotation in history, but also a watershed moment in the rise of neoliberalism and deregulation. In Visions of a Digital Nation, Ward offers an incisive interdisciplinary perspective on how technology prefigured this pivot. Giving due consideration to the politicians, engineers, and managers who paved the way for this historic moment, Ward illustrates how the decision validated the privatization of public utilities and tied digital technology to free market rationales. In this examination of the national and, at times, global history of technology, Ward’s approac

Isabella Alexander's book Copyright and Cartography: History, Law, and the Circulation of Geographical Knowledge (Bloomsbury, 2023) explores the intertwined histories of mapmaking and copyright law in Britain from the early modern period up to World War 1, focusing chiefly on the 18th and 19th centuries. Taking a multidisciplinary approach and making extensive use of the archival record, this is the first detailed, historical account of the relationship between maps and copyright. As such, it examines how the emergence and development of copyright law affected mapmakers and the map trade and how the application of copyright law to the field of mapmaking affected the development of copyright doctrine. Its explorations cast new light on the circulation of geographical knowledge, different cultures of authorship and creativity, and connections between copyright law, print culture, technology, and society.  The book will be of interest to legal historians, intellectual property scholars, and historians of the map

Ingrid Piller speaks with Piers Kelly about a fascinating form of visual communication, Australian message sticks. What does a message stick look like? What is its purpose, and how has the use of message sticks changed over time from the precolonial period via the late 19th/early 20th century and into the present? Why do we know so little about message sticks, and how has colonialism shaped our knowledge about message sticks? How did message sticks fit into the multilingual communication ecology of precolonial Australia? And, of course, the million-dollar question: are message sticks a form of writing? First published on August 18, 2020. “Chats in Linguistic Diversity” is a podcast about linguistic diversity in social life brought to you by the Language on the Move team. We explore multilingualism, language learning, and intercultural communication in the contexts of globalization and migration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https

Tudor Networks of Power (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Ruth Ahnert & Dr. Sebastian Ahnert is the product of a groundbreaking collaboration between an early modern book historian and a physicist specialising in complex networks. Together they have reconstructed and computationally analysed the networks of intelligence, diplomacy, and political influence across a century of Tudor history (1509-1603), based on the British State Papers. The 130,000 letters that survive in the State Papers from the Tudor period provide crucial information about the textual organisation of the social network centred on the Tudor government. Whole libraries have been written using this archive, but until now nobody has had access to the macroscopic tools that allow us to ask questions such as: What are the reasons for the structure of the Tudor government's intelligence network? What was it geographical reach and coverage? Can we use network data to show patterns of surveillance? What role did women play in these government