Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology

by Marianne van den Boomen, Sybille Lammes, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Joost Raessens, Mirko Tobias Schafer

Overview

Three decades of societal and cultural alignment of new media have yielded a host of innovations, trials, and problems, accompanied by versatile popular and academic discourse. New Media Studies crystallized internationally into an established academic discipline, and this begs the question: where do we stand now? Which new questions are emerging now that new media are being taken for granted, and which riddles are still unsolved? Is contemporary digital culture indeed all about 'you', the participating user, or do we still not really understand the digital machinery and how this constitutes us as 'you'? The contributors to the present book, all employed in teaching and researching new media and digital culture, assembled their 'digital material' into an anthology, covering issues ranging from desktop metaphors to Web 2.0 ecosystems, from touch screens to blogging and e-learning, from role-playing games and cybergothic music to wireless dreams. Together the contributions provide a showcase of current research in the field, from what may be called a 'digital-materialist' perspective.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789089640680
Publisher:	Amsterdam University Press
Publication date:	09/15/2009
Series:	MediaMatters Series , #2
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Marianne van den Boomen, Sybille Lammes, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Joost Raessens, and Mirko Tobias Schäfer are all researchers in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Utrecht.

Table of Contents

Introduction: From the virtual to matters of fact and concern

Processor

Joost Raessens

Serious games from an apparatus perspective

David B. Nieborg

Empower yourself, defend freedom! Playing games during times of war

Eggo Müller

Formatted spaces of participation: Interactive television and the changing relationship between production and consumption

Erna Kotkamp

Digital objects in e-learning environments: The case of WebCT

Memory

Imar de Vries

The vanishing points of mobile communication

Jos de Mul

The work of art in the age of digital recombination

Berteke Waaldijk

The design of world citizenship: A historical comparison between world exhibitions and the web

Isabella van Elferen

‘And machine created music’: Cybergothic music and the phantom voices of the technological uncanny

Network

William Uricchio

Moving beyond the artefact: Lessons from participatory culture

Mirko Tobias Schäfer

Participation inside? User activities between design and appropriation

Marinka Copier

Challenging the magic circle: How online role-playing games are negotiated by everyday life

Douglas Rushkoff

Renaissance now! The gamers’ perspective

Screen

Frank Kessler

What you get is what you see: Digital images and the claim on the real

Eva Nieuwdorp

The pervasive interface: Tracing the magic circle

Nanna Verhoeff

A grip on the screen: Towards a conceptualization of touch, mobility and multiplicity

Sybille Lammes

Terra incognita: Computer games, cartography and spatial stories

Keyboard

Thomas  Poell

Conceptualizing forums and blogs as public sphere

Marianne van den Boomen

Interfacing by material metaphors: How your mailbox may fool you

Ann-Sophie Lehmann

Hidden practice: The representation of artists’ working spaces, tools and materials in digital visual culture

About the authors

Index