This collection frames a theory of twenty-first century media in a world where the vast majority of internet users reside in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The COVID-19 pandemic dramatised a complex set of technological infrastructures that now shape life in pragmatic and exceptional ways. Cognition, public affect, memory, and the experience of the political have been radically transformed with twenty-first century media networks. Acts of violence become media spectacles in network spaces. Questions of media aesthetics and political affect have taken centre stage in an expanded digital sensorium. This volume revisits and pushes beyond older questions of social and cultural theory and the metamorphoses of the political in this century. Moving beyond classical critical theory, it brings together scholars from media studies, anthropology, cinema, and contemporary art, and provides a comparative landscape and turbulent futures of media aesthetics. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
