Patrick Vonderau – författare

The iPhone has revolutionized not only how people communicate but also how we consume and produce culture. Combining traditional and social media with mobile connectivity, smartphones have redefined and expanded the dimensions of everyday life, allowing individuals to personalize media as they move and process constant flows of data. Today, millions of consumers love and live by their iPhones, but what are the implications of its special technology on society, media, and culture?Featuring an eclectic mix of original essays, Moving Data explores the iPhone as technological prototype, lifestyle gadget, and platform for media creativity. Media experts, cultural critics, and scholars consider the device''s newness and usability—even its "lickability"—and its "biographical" story. The book illuminates patterns of consumption; the fate of solitude against smartphone ubiquity; the economy of the App Store and its perceived "crisis of choice"; and the distance between the accessibility of digital information and the protocols governing its use. Alternating between critical and conceptual analyses, essays link the design of participatory media to the iPhone''s technological features and sharing routines, and they follow the extent to which the pleasures of gesture-based interfaces are redefining media use and sensory experience. They also consider how user-led innovations, collaborative mapping, and creative empowerment are understood and reconciled through changes in mobile surveillance, personal rights, and prescriptive social software. Presenting a range of perspectives and arguments, this book reorients the practice and study of media critique.

An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience.

Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of “teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify''s product and the way it is commonly understood.

Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online.

Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify''s “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors'' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.

While moving image advertising has been around us, everywhere, for at least a century, the topic has tended to be overlooked by cinema studies. This far-reaching new collection makes an incisive contribution to a new field of study, by exploring the history, theory and practice of moving image advertising, and emphasising the dynamic and lasting relationships between print, film, broadcasting and advertising cultures.

In chapters written by an international ensemble of leading scholars and archivists, the book covers a variety of materials from pre-show advertising films to lantern slides and sponsored ''educations''. With case studies of advertising campaigns and archival collections from a range of different countries, and giving consideration to the problems that advertising materials pose for preservation and presentation, this rich and expansive text testifies to the need for a new approach to this burgeoning subject that looks beyond the mere study of promotional film.

From the Introduction:

"There are certainly enough ingredients to fire imagination: a director [Mauritz Stiller] who had just finished a masterpiece [Gösta Berlings Saga]; a leading lady, the directors protégée, becoming known through his film [Greta Garbo]; a Russian exile with an extraordinary true story to tell [Vladimir Semitjov]; a film company with a spectacular big budget production in Egypt on its track record [Trianon Film AG]; an extravagant hotel in Constantinople, in a setting bridging East and West, poverty and luxury, set against the background of the recent Russian revolution; a heated quarrel on intellectual property rights; a film crew in distress, left by their director on Christmas Eve as luck had turned; The End."

No film, but a rediscovered manuscript A Tale from Constantinople written by Mauritz Stiller and Ragnar Hyltén-Cavallius, here published for the first time with an introduction and two contextualising essays.