Routledge Focus on Digital Media and Culture – serie

This book examines the politics involved in the mobilization of the Latinx vote in America. Delving into the questions of race and identity formation in conjunction with the role of communication media, the author discusses the implications for Latinx voters and their place in the American political and racial system.Utilizing an in-depth study of the mobilizing efforts of national Latinx groups, along with a rigorous analysis of online media, news media, and electoral results, this book discusses: How the old notions of white and black America clash with the growing focus on Latinos How political organizers develop and use messages of racial solidarity to motivate people, what technologies are at their disposal, and what their use means How the study of new media is vital to exploring race in the 21st century, and why communication cannot ignore the racial legacies of the 20th century Theoretically located in between the fields of communication and racial/ethnic studies, this book will be of great relevance to scholars and students working in the field of communication studies, political communication, Latinx studies, and sociology.

This book offers a comprehensive scholarly overview of Reddit, one of the most popular and least studied social platforms of the early 21st century.The book inspires new ways of thinking about Reddit, considering it from multiple perspectives: through a historical lens, as a site where identity is forged, as a democracy, as a community, and as a news aggregator and distributor. By bringing theories from computer-mediated communication, communication studies, and sociology to bear on original, large-scale observational analyses of Reddit’s communities, this book provides a uniquely comprehensive overview of the platform’s first 15 years. Understanding Reddit will help us make sense of how rapidly growing communities function in an era of mass online anonymity.Serving both as a primer on how social behavior on Reddit plays out, and as a way of locating it within multiple theoretical traditions, the book will offer important insights to scholars and students in the disciplines of communication, media studies, information science, internet and emerging media studies, and sociology.

This book offers a comprehensive scholarly overview of Reddit, one of the most popular and least studied social platforms of the early 21st century.The book inspires new ways of thinking about Reddit, considering it from multiple perspectives: through a historical lens, as a site where identity is forged, as a democracy, as a community, and as a news aggregator and distributor. By bringing theories from computer-mediated communication, communication studies, and sociology to bear on original, large-scale observational analyses of Reddit’s communities, this book provides a uniquely comprehensive overview of the platform’s first 15 years. Understanding Reddit will help us make sense of how rapidly growing communities function in an era of mass online anonymity.Serving both as a primer on how social behavior on Reddit plays out, and as a way of locating it within multiple theoretical traditions, the book will offer important insights to scholars and students in the disciplines of communication, media studies, information science, internet and emerging media studies, and sociology.

This volume analyzes the Serial podcast, situating it in the trajectory of other popular crime narratives and contemporary cultural theory. Contributors focus on topics such as the ethics of the use of fiction techniques in investigative journalism, the epistemological overlay of postmodern indeterminacy, and the audience’s prolific activity in social media, examining the competing narrative strategies of the narrators, characters, and the audience. Other topics considered include the multiplication of narratives and the longing for closure, how our minds work as we experience true crime narratives, and what critical race theory can teach us about the program’s strategies.

In this thought-provoking volume, Eran Fisher interrogates the relationship between algorithms as epistemic devices and modern notions of subjectivity.Over the past few decades, as the instrumentalization of algorithms has created knowledge that informs our decisions, preferences, tastes, and actions, and the very sense of who we are, they have also undercut, and arguably undermined, the Enlightenment-era ideal of the subject. Fisher finds that as algorithms enable a reality in which knowledge is created by circumventing the participation of the self, they also challenge contemporary notions of subjectivity.Through four case-studies, this book provides an empirical and theoretical investigation of this transformation, analyzing how algorithmic knowledge differs from the ideas of critical knowledge which emerged during modernity – Fisher argues that algorithms create a new type of knowledge, which in turn changes our fundamental sense of self and our concept of subjectivity.This book will make a timely contribution to the social study of algorithms and will prove especially valuable for scholars working at the intersections of media and communication studies, internet studies, information studies, the sociology of technology, the philosophy of technology, and science and technology studies.

In this thought-provoking volume, Eran Fisher interrogates the relationship between algorithms as epistemic devices and modern notions of subjectivity.Over the past few decades, as the instrumentalization of algorithms has created knowledge that informs our decisions, preferences, tastes, and actions, and the very sense of who we are, they have also undercut, and arguably undermined, the Enlightenment-era ideal of the subject. Fisher finds that as algorithms enable a reality in which knowledge is created by circumventing the participation of the self, they also challenge contemporary notions of subjectivity.Through four case-studies, this book provides an empirical and theoretical investigation of this transformation, analyzing how algorithmic knowledge differs from the ideas of critical knowledge which emerged during modernity – Fisher argues that algorithms create a new type of knowledge, which in turn changes our fundamental sense of self and our concept of subjectivity.This book will make a timely contribution to the social study of algorithms and will prove especially valuable for scholars working at the intersections of media and communication studies, internet studies, information studies, the sociology of technology, the philosophy of technology, and science and technology studies.

Cypherpunk Ethics explores the moral worldview of the cypherpunks, a movement that advocates the use of strong digital cryptography—or crypto, for short—to defend individual privacy and promote institutional transparency in the digital age. Focusing on the writings of Timothy May and Julian Assange, two of the most prolific and influential cypherpunks, the book examines two competing paradigms of cypherpunk philosophy—crypto anarchy and crypto justice—and examines the implications of cypherpunk ethics for a range of contemporary moral issues, including surveillance, privacy, whistleblowing, cryptocurrencies, journalism, democracy, censorship, intellectual property, and power. Rooted in theory but with very real applications, this volume will appeal not only to students and scholars of digital media, communication, journalism, philosophy, political science, critical data studies, sociology, and the history of technology but also to technologists and activists around the world.

This book examines the collection and curation of music, and the way digital streaming services are transforming the way we engage with the media. The study foregrounds personal digital curation techniques, rather than algorithms or technology, to acknowledge the sustaining human agency involved in playlisting. The author looks at Digital Service Providers such as Spotify, Apple and Deezer, which offer their users not just access to large collections of music, but also the opportunity to create and maintain personalised consumption subsets such as playlists. Positioning these current playlisting practices as a remediation of significant cultural practices of the 20th century – such as collecting records and mix-taping – the book highlights the continuity of culture through media change, and the implications for concepts of self and identity, society and sharing. Shedding new light on this contemporary cultural phenomenon, this book will be an important read for scholars who are interested in the area of digital music from different disciplines such as communication, digital humanities and social sciences in fields of media studies, digital cultures, personal information management, digital curation and popular music.

Cypherpunk Ethics explores the moral worldview of the cypherpunks, a movement that advocates the use of strong digital cryptography—or crypto, for short—to defend individual privacy and promote institutional transparency in the digital age. Focusing on the writings of Timothy May and Julian Assange, two of the most prolific and influential cypherpunks, the book examines two competing paradigms of cypherpunk philosophy—crypto anarchy and crypto justice—and examines the implications of cypherpunk ethics for a range of contemporary moral issues, including surveillance, privacy, whistleblowing, cryptocurrencies, journalism, democracy, censorship, intellectual property, and power. Rooted in theory but with very real applications, this volume will appeal not only to students and scholars of digital media, communication, journalism, philosophy, political science, critical data studies, sociology, and the history of technology but also to technologists and activists around the world.

This book examines the collection and curation of music, and the way digital streaming services are transforming the way we engage with the media. The study foregrounds personal digital curation techniques, rather than algorithms or technology, to acknowledge the sustaining human agency involved in playlisting. The author looks at Digital Service Providers such as Spotify, Apple and Deezer, which offer their users not just access to large collections of music, but also the opportunity to create and maintain personalised consumption subsets such as playlists. Positioning these current playlisting practices as a remediation of significant cultural practices of the 20th century – such as collecting records and mix-taping – the book highlights the continuity of culture through media change, and the implications for concepts of self and identity, society and sharing. Shedding new light on this contemporary cultural phenomenon, this book will be an important read for scholars who are interested in the area of digital music from different disciplines such as communication, digital humanities and social sciences in fields of media studies, digital cultures, personal information management, digital curation and popular music.

This book examines the politics involved in the mobilization of the Latinx vote in America. Delving into the questions of race and identity formation in conjunction with the role of communication media, the author discusses the implications for Latinx voters and their place in the American political and racial system.Utilizing an in-depth study of the mobilizing efforts of national Latinx groups, along with a rigorous analysis of online media, news media, and electoral results, this book discusses: How the old notions of white and black America clash with the growing focus on Latinos How political organizers develop and use messages of racial solidarity to motivate people, what technologies are at their disposal, and what their use means How the study of new media is vital to exploring race in the 21st century, and why communication cannot ignore the racial legacies of the 20th century Theoretically located in between the fields of communication and racial/ethnic studies, this book will be of great relevance to scholars and students working in the field of communication studies, political communication, Latinx studies, and sociology.

This book takes a Marxist approach to the study of media piracy – the production, distribution, and consumption of media texts in violation of intellectual property laws – to examine its place as an endemic feature of the cultural economy since the rise of the Internet. The author explores media piracy not in terms of its moral or legal failings, or as the inevitable by-product of digital technologies, but as a symptom of a much larger restructuring of cultural labor in the era of the Internet: labor that is digital, entrepreneurial, informal, and even illegal, and increasingly politicized. Sketching the contours of this new political economy while engaging with theories of digital media, both critical and celebratory, Mueller reveals piracy as a submerged social history of the digital world, and potentially the key to its political reimagining. This significant contribution to the study of piracy and digital culture will be vital reading for scholars and students of critical media studies, cultural studies, political theory, or digital humanities, and particularly those researching media piracy, digital labor, the digital economy, and Marxist theory.

This book takes a multidisciplinary approach to the question of esports and their role in society. A diverse group of authors tackle the impact of esports and the ways in which it has grown within the entertainment industry around the world.Chapters offer a coherent response to the following questions: What role do esports play in the entertainment industry? What communication skills can be learned through esports? What do the media gain from broadcasting esports? What is the relationship between social networks and esports? What are the main marketing strategies used in esports? What effect does communicative globalization have on the development of esports? What is the relationship between merchandising and esports? What do communication experts think about esports? Offering clear insights into this rapidly developing area, this volume will be of great interest to scholars, students, and anyone working in game studies, new media, leisure, sport studies, communication studies, transmedia literacy, and digital culture.The Open Access version of this book has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003273691/esports-media-angel-torres-toukoumidis

This book takes a multidisciplinary approach to the question of esports and their role in society. A diverse group of authors tackle the impact of esports and the ways in which it has grown within the entertainment industry around the world.Chapters offer a coherent response to the following questions: What role do esports play in the entertainment industry? What communication skills can be learned through esports? What do the media gain from broadcasting esports? What is the relationship between social networks and esports? What are the main marketing strategies used in esports? What effect does communicative globalization have on the development of esports? What is the relationship between merchandising and esports? What do communication experts think about esports? Offering clear insights into this rapidly developing area, this volume will be of great interest to scholars, students, and anyone working in game studies, new media, leisure, sport studies, communication studies, transmedia literacy, and digital culture.The Open Access version of this book has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003273691/esports-media-angel-torres-toukoumidis

TikTok Cultures in the United States examines the role of TikTok in US popular culture, paying close attention to the app’s growing body of subcultures.Featuring an array of scholars from varied disciplines and backgrounds, this book uses TikTok (sub)cultures as a point of departure from which to explore TikTok’s role in US popular culture today. Engaging with the extensive and growing scholarship on TikTok from international scholars, chapters in this book create frameworks and blueprints from which to analyze TikTok within a distinctly US context, examining topics such as gender and sexuality, feminism, race and ethnicity and wellness.Shaping TikTok as an interdisciplinary field in and of itself, this insightful and timely volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of new and digital media, social media, popular culture, communication studies, sociology of media, dance, gender studies, and performance studies.

TikTok Cultures in the United States examines the role of TikTok in US popular culture, paying close attention to the app’s growing body of subcultures.Featuring an array of scholars from varied disciplines and backgrounds, this book uses TikTok (sub)cultures as a point of departure from which to explore TikTok’s role in US popular culture today. Engaging with the extensive and growing scholarship on TikTok from international scholars, chapters in this book create frameworks and blueprints from which to analyze TikTok within a distinctly US context, examining topics such as gender and sexuality, feminism, race and ethnicity and wellness.Shaping TikTok as an interdisciplinary field in and of itself, this insightful and timely volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of new and digital media, social media, popular culture, communication studies, sociology of media, dance, gender studies, and performance studies.

Smart Stardom explores how contemporary celebrities are digitally replicated and re-circulated through advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer-generated imagery, real-time rendering, and virtual and augmented media.Discussing how these digital developments produce highly compelling virtual versions of real stars – what the book terms the “smart star” – whose digital identities remain anchored to recognisable, real-world figures, the authors explore how these virtual celebrities generate economic and cultural value through familiarity, affective connection, and nostalgia, while also embodying urgent questions about consent, ownership, and the control of famous faces and voices. Drawing on a wide range of global case studies from film, music, advertising, activism, and politics, Smart Stardom examines how key figures are mobilised to help audiences engage with emerging digital environments, and how celebrity operates as a key point of entry into complex and often opaque technologies, used to authenticate new experiences while negotiating public anxieties around AI, data, and digital identity. Structured around the themes of image, likeness, nostalgia, and trust, Smart Stardom asks why celebrity remains vital to the adoption of new digital technologies, exploring both the agency of public figures in extending their identities into virtual spaces and the ways the global entertainment industry has expanded and exploited the appeal of licensed digital stardom.This book will appeal to researchers, students and scholars working in film and media industries, human-computer interaction (HCI), business, cultural theory, fandom studies, technology studies, sociology, and media stardom.

This volume investigates the intersection of generative AI and media aesthetics from an interdisciplinary perspective. Combining in-depth theoretical reflection with a diverse selection of case studies, its authors explore the aesthetic forms of AI-generated medial objects as well as the cultural imaginaries that the latter draw upon.Bringing together a group of scholars from various geographic and disciplinary backgrounds, the chapters move within and across different conceptualizations of “AI aesthetics” that can be located in-between an “aesthetics-as-artistics” (that is primarily concerned with aesthetic judgments related to skill and connoisseurship) and an “aesthetics-as-aisthetics” (that identifies all kinds of embodied perception as its object). The book thus reflects on both the theoretical and the methodological implications of “AI aesthetics,” while also demonstrating that this is still very much an emerging research field and that no dominant conceptualization of “AI aesthetics” has yet emerged.Considering its decidedly international and interdisciplinary scope, AI Aesthetics: AI-Generated Images between Artistics and Aisthetics will appeal to scholars and students within media studies, cultural studies, literary studies, philosophy, art history, visual culture studies, digital humanities, and critical AI studies.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Screen Encounters with Britain explores how global streaming platforms are reshaping viewing patterns and audience encounters, using the circulation, consumption and reception of British films and TV shows in European markets as a case study.Focusing on young audiences in Denmark, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, the book provides original audience insights drawing on a wide range of methods, including a survey, digital diaries and interviews and offers a critical perspective on the evolving nature of young audiences' engagement with longform screen content. The evidence presented points towards re-asserted Anglo-American dominance, driven by the power of large US-owned platforms and English as the language of advantage. Building on these findings, the book challenges established theory around the ‘home advantage’ of domestic media and rethinks linguistic and cultural proximity. This volume will appeal to scholars and students researching transnational media, audience studies, screen production studies, media industries and youth studies. More broadly, the book will be of interest to scholars and students of the political economy of the media within the social sciences and humanities.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This book highlights some of the crucial crossroads – moments in which choices as to the future relationship between humans and digital technologies have to be made – that societies face in light of the growing development and adoption of AI.As contemporary societies undergo profound transformations driven by artificial intelligence and related technologies, a unilinear vision of inevitable ‘progress’ and development increasingly dominates public discourse. This book offers a counterpoint, challenging such deterministic narratives by mapping out the complex crossroads where futures ought to be shaped rather than passively received. Exploring a multiplicity of domains as diverse as education, heritage, creativity, the biological and technological boundaries of humans, work, war, and space colonialism, both the dominant (typically progressivist) and alternative (critical) ways of framing the present and the future are outlined, identifying choices to be made. The book teases out the underlying tendencies and underscores a recurring necessity to make value choices as to our further development, not only as societies but also as humanity, and in terms of regulatory choices. It reveals how decisions in these domains are shaped by ingrained intellectual, ideological, political, value-based, and economic assumptions, often hidden beneath the rhetoric of inevitability. These crossroads are not just technical or economic choices, but moral and societal: Between maximising efficiency and safeguarding plurality; between treating technological possibilities as imperatives and critically evaluating their desirability; between moral blindness and care. By illuminating the options available, the book invites readers to take an active role in choosing the future shape of societies and of humanity itself.This interdisciplinary and creative text will benefit all graduate-level and scholarly readers working on AI within the fields of media and communication, cultural studies, sociology, and cultural anthropology.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.The publication is a part of the project "Strengthening the R&D activities of the Vytautas Kavolis Transdisciplinary Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (SOCMTEP)". The project is funded by the Research Council of Lithuania and the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport of the Republic of Lithuania, Contract No S-A-UEI-23-13 (2023-12-27).

This book takes a Marxist approach to the study of media piracy – the production, distribution, and consumption of media texts in violation of intellectual property laws – to examine its place as an endemic feature of the cultural economy since the rise of the Internet. The author explores media piracy not in terms of its moral or legal failings, or as the inevitable by-product of digital technologies, but as a symptom of a much larger restructuring of cultural labor in the era of the Internet: labor that is digital, entrepreneurial, informal, and even illegal, and increasingly politicized. Sketching the contours of this new political economy while engaging with theories of digital media, both critical and celebratory, Mueller reveals piracy as a submerged social history of the digital world, and potentially the key to its political reimagining. This significant contribution to the study of piracy and digital culture will be vital reading for scholars and students of critical media studies, cultural studies, political theory, or digital humanities, and particularly those researching media piracy, digital labor, the digital economy, and Marxist theory.

This volume analyzes the Serial podcast, situating it in the trajectory of other popular crime narratives and contemporary cultural theory. Contributors focus on topics such as the ethics of the use of fiction techniques in investigative journalism, the epistemological overlay of postmodern indeterminacy, and the audience’s prolific activity in social media, examining the competing narrative strategies of the narrators, characters, and the audience. Other topics considered include the multiplication of narratives and the longing for closure, how our minds work as we experience true crime narratives, and what critical race theory can teach us about the program’s strategies.