media theory

This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.

The digital age has had a profound impact on literary culture, with new technologies opening up opportunities for new forms of literary art from hyperfiction to multi-media poetry and narrative-driven games. Bringing together leading scholars and artists from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is the first authoritative reference handbook to the field.Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book explores the foundational theories of the field, contemporary artistic practices, debates and controversies surrounding such key concepts as canonicity, world systems, narrative and the digital humanities, and historical developments and new media contexts of contemporary electronic literature. Including guides to major publications in the field, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is an essential resource for scholars of contemporary culture in the digital era.

(Source: Publisher's description)

In his new book, Michael Wutz examines how the work of four canonical novelists - Norris, Lowry, Doctorow, and Powers - register the revolutions in 20th century media technology. Such an analysis, reviewer Joseph Conte suggests, is an important extension of Kittlerian media theory to the field of American literature.

(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/enduring) 

Klaus Peter Dencker, visual poet, Germanist and media theorist, documents the spectrum of forms of optical poetry from its pre-historic beginnings up to the present digital age. The compendium provides a typology of optical poetry, an international historical overview with many illustrations and several chronological tables together with indexes of subjects and names providing access to the comprehensive apparatus of notes. (Source: https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/176646)

In this paper I argue that the restrictions imposed by technological barriers within select forms of digital literature and net art are cause for the success of these works from the early internet to the present—the technological restrictions themselves guided their formulation. Arguably, the
constraints create the aesthetic context in which the works thrive, while the artist figure
transforms into mechanical producer.
I ground my research in earlier studies I have engaged in, tracing the creation of digital literature and net art around the network itself. I build upon these theories and engage in media theory analyses of the networked communication systems from which these works were created. I observe how works of digital literature and net art are specifically inhibited by the technology on which they were created for: Apple BASIC restricts bpNichols works from using lowercase lettering; the Apple Lisa (1983) integrates the mouse but the Apple Inc (1984) removes most of this accessibility from the user and restricts interactive fiction; the Apple Macintosh, less adaptable to change, experiences (relatively) widespread adoption as the DIY spirit from the Apple I series and its digital literature works quickly fade. Hardt and Negri describe how labor transforms the organization of production—linear relationships of the assembly line transform into indeterminate relationships of distributed networks. I evidence how these basic moves within these distributed networks of digital literature and net art production embrace the restriction of the medium, depend on it, and in fact integrate these formal elements into the early digital literature aesthetic. Such identifiable elements, visible in contemporary works, are in fact traceable to the early occurences in the mid-1980s as I demonstrate.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is a 1964 book by Marshall McLuhan, a pioneering study in media theory. McLuhan proposes that the media, not the content that they carry, should be the focus of study. He suggests that the medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered through it, but by the characteristics of the medium. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as an example. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society — in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example — the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it. The book is the source of the well-known phrase "The medium is the message". It was a leading indicator of the upheaval of local cultures by increasingly globalized values. The book greatly influenced academics, writers, and social theorists.

The term "new media" is a current buzzword among scholars and in the media industry, referring to the ever-multiplying digitized modes of film/image and sound production and distribution. Yet how new, in fact, are these new media, and how does their rise affect the role of older media? What new theories allow us to examine our culture of ubiquitous electronic screens and networked pleasures? Is a completely new set of perspectives, concepts, and paradigms required, or are older modes of discussion about the relationship between technology and art still adequate? This book reconsiders the seminal work of German media theorists such as Adorno, Benjamin, and Kracauer in order to explore today's rapidly changing mediascape, questioning the naive progressivism that informs much of today's discourse about media technologies. The contributions, by internationally-recognized critics from a variety of academic fields, encourage a view of the history of media as structured by difference, complexity, and multiplicity. Together, they offer intriguing ways of understanding the changed position of media in today's Germany and beyond. Contributors: Nora M. Alter, Michel Chaouli, Diedrich Diederichsen, Sabine Eckmann, Margit Grieb, Boris Groys, Juliet Koss, Richard Langston, Lev Manovich, Todd Presner, Juliane Rebentisch, Carsten Strathausen. Lutz Koepnick is Professor of German, Film and Media Studies, and Erin McGlothlin is Associate Professor of German and Jewish Studies, both at Washington University in St. Louis.

Source: Publisher's Peritext

Giorgio Agamben has identified the “State of Exception” as the emergent principle of governance for the 21st Century. To summarize Agamben’s argument, alongside the emergence of modern theories of governance (democratic societies with defined human rights), a state of permanent emergency has been declared in response to the various threats (terrorism, ecological disasters, migration, etc.) that have enabled an exception to the rule to persist as the emerging norm. Parallel to this crisis in politics, there is the increasing currency of the term emergence in literary criticism, media theory, and cultural studies to describe the general state of change. Increasingly, this term is used to describe change as a benign and specifically digital determinism. This paper will consider electronic literature as both a laboratory for formal innovation and a site of critique. Specifically, this paper will take into account the relationship between literacy, law, literature and criticism and will rely upon readings of relevant works, like Pullinger and Joseph’s Flight Paths, Baldwin’s New Word Order, and Marino’s Show of Hands, works that deal with dislocation, interruption, and other states of exception.

(Source: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/literature-state-eme…)

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the printed word was shattered by the arrival of new media technologies that offered novel ways of communicating and storing data. Previously, writing had operated by way of symbolic mediation—all data had to pass through the needle's eye of the written signifier—but phonography, photography, and cinematography stored physical effects of the real in the shape of sound waves and light. The entire question of referentiality had to be recast in light of these new media technologies; in addition, the use of the typewriter changed the perception of writing from that of a unique expression of a literate individual to that of a sequence of naked material signifiers. Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, part theoretical discussion of the responses to these media—including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators—Gramophone, Film, Typewriter analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies. The book ties the establishment of new discursive practices to the introduction of new media technologies, and it shows how both determine the ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of the psychic apparatus in terms of information machines. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter is, among other things, a continuation as well as a detailed elaboration of the second part of the author's Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford, 1990). As such, it bridges the gap between Kittler's discourse analysis of the 1980's and his increasingly computer-oriented work of the 1990's.

(Source: Stanford University Press catalog copy)