Media Matter: The Materiality of Media, Matter as Medium (Thinking Media) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501320106 ISBN 13: 9781501320101

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017

Synopsis

Launching Bloomsbury's Thinking Media series, Media Matter introduces readers to the nascent field of media-philosophy. Contributors urge readers to re-adjust their ideas of Media Studies, by extending the understanding of "medium" to include a concept of materiality that also includes "non-human" transmitters (elements such as water, earth, fire, air) and also by understanding media not only in the context of cultural or discursive systems or apparatuses, relays, transistors, hardware or "discourse networks," but more inclusively, in terms of a "media ecology."

Beginning with more general essays on media and then focusing on particular themes (neuroplasticity, photography, sculpture and music), especially in relation to film, Herzogenrath and the contributors redefine the concept of "medium" in order to think through media, rather than about them.

About this title

Review:

media

matter continues the important work on materiality of media. The chapters offer inspiring and rich analyses into how voice and sound, film and text open up to realities unthought of. The book is an important addition to the growing body of work on new materialism and is of interest to sound, film and media studies students and scholars.
Jussi Parikka, Professor of Media & Design, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK, and author of What is Media Archaeology? and A Geology of Media

Media and communications' role in the world has been a dominant area of research-perhaps the dominant area of research-for the past hundred years. Yet strangely, the material world itself has often seemed absent, except as relegated to a support for technical or social developments. Now, however, things are changing. Existing concepts of the importance and nature of the material world are being questioned in the harsh light of uncertain futures. With this, the very concept of media is morphing into something new. Media

About the Author:

Bernd Herzogenrath is Professor of American Studies at the University of Frankfurt, Germany.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1501320106
• ISBN 13: 9781501320101
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 326
• Editor: Herzogenrath Bernd