Media Materialities: Form, Format, and Ephemeral Meaning (BCMCR New Directions in Media and Cultural Research) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1835952046 ISBN 13: 9781835952047

Publisher: Intellect Books, 2025

Synopsis

Provides new perspectives on the increasingly complex relationships between media forms and formats, materiality, and meaning. Drawing on a range of qualitative methodologies, our consideration of the materiality of media is structured around three overarching concepts: form – the physical qualities of objects and the meanings which extend from them; format – objects considered in relation to the protocols which govern their use, and the meanings and practices which stem from them; and ephemeral meaning – the ways in which media artefacts are captured, transformed, and redefined through changing social, cultural, and technological values.

Each section includes empirical chapters which provide expansive discussions of perspectives on media and materiality. It considers a range of media artefacts such as 8mm film, board games maps, videogames, cassette tapes, transistor radios and Twitter, amongst others. These are punctuated with a number of short takes – less formal, often personal takes exploring the meanings of media in context.

We seek to consider the materialities which emerge across the broad and variegated range of the term’s use, and to create spaces for conversation and debate about the implications that this plurality of material meanings might have for the study of study of media, culture, and society.

About this title

About the Authors

Dr Ian Taylor is Assistant Professor of Social Science Research Methods at Richmond, the American University in London, and a Distance Learning Tutor with the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester.

Dr Oliver Carter is a reader in creative economies at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, Birmingham City University. His research focuses on alternative economies of cultural production; informal forms of industry that are often removed from a formal cultural industries discourse. He is the author of the monograph Making European Cult Cinema: Fan Enterprise in an Alternative Economy (Amsterdam University Press, 2018).

Edition details

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1835952046
• ISBN 13: 9781835952047
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 282
• Editor: Taylor Iain A., Carter Dr. Oliver