Collaborative Media – Production, Consumption, and Design Interventions - Hardcover

Löwgren, Jonas; Reimer, Bo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262019760 ISBN 13: 9780262019767

Publisher: MIT Press, 2013

Synopsis

With many new forms of digital media--including such popular social media as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr -- the people formerly known as the audience no longer only consume but also produce and even design media. Jonas Lowgren and Bo Reimer term this phenomenon collaborative media, and in this book they investigate the qualities and characteristics of these forms of media in terms of what they enable people to do. They do so through an interdisciplinary research approach that combines the social sciences and humanities traditions of empirical and theoretical work with practice-based, design-oriented interventions. Lowgren and Reimer offer analysis and a series of illuminating case studies -- examples of projects in collaborative media that range from small multidisciplinary research experiments to commercial projects used by millions of people. Lowgren and Reimer discuss the case studies at three levels of analysis: society and the role of collaborative media in societal change; institutions and the relationship of collaborative media with established media structures; and tribes, the nurturing of small communities within a large technical infrastructure. They conclude by advocating an interventionist turn within social analysis and media design.


REVIEW

Jonas Löwgren and Bo Reimer provide a fresh perspective on the changing patterns of infrastructure, design, production and consumption of new media ... Löwgren and Reimer thoroughly analyse a complex set of issues related to this cultural shift, enriching the existing academic and public debates with new evidence from original case studies and a detailed theoretical discussion of what constitutes collaborative media in the 21st century. I salute the authors for this achievement and highly recommend reading this book.

Vyacheslav W. Polonski, LSE Review of Books

Collaborative Media is fundamentally a book about how we design, satirize, reappropriate and invent over again. It demonstrates why we should not focus so much on the user in the singular, but in the plural. The book is necessary and warmly recommended scholarly intervention if you want to understand design and collaborative media -- but also collaborative media research.

Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art; author of What is Media Archaeology?

About this title

About the Authors

Jonas Löwgren is Professor of Interaction Design at Malmö University. He is the coauthor of Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology (MIT Press).

Bo Reimer is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Malmö University. He is the coauthor of The Politics of Postmodernity.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262019760
• ISBN 13: 9780262019767
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248