[ecrea] New book: Life after New Media

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Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska
LIFE AFTER NEW MEDIA: MEDIATION AS A VITAL PROCESS
Cambridge, MA:&  London, England: MIT Press 2012

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12999

In Life after New Media, Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska make a case
for a significant shift in our understanding of new media. They argue
that we should move beyond our fascination with objects--computers,
smart phones, iPods, Kindles--to an examination of the interlocking
technical, social, and biological processes of mediation. Doing so, they
say, reveals that life itself can be understood as mediated--subject to
the same processes of reproduction, transformation, flattening, and
patenting undergone by other media forms.

By Kember and Zylinska’s account, the dispersal of media and technology
into our biological and social lives intensifies our entanglement with
nonhuman entities. Mediation--all-encompassing and indivisible--becomes
for them a key trope for understanding our being in the technological
world. Drawing on the work of Bergson and Derrida while displaying a
rigorous playfulness toward philosophy, Kember and Zylinska examine the
multiple flows of mediation. Importantly, they also consider the ethical
necessity of making a “cut” to any media processes in order to contain
them. Considering topics that range from media-enacted cosmic events to
the intelligent home, they propose a new way of “doing” media studies
that is simultaneously critical and creative, and that performs an
encounter between theory and practice.

Contents

Epigraph: Media, Mars, and Metamorphosis (An Excerpt)
Introduction: New Media, Old Hat
1 Mediation and the Vitality of Media
2 Catastrophe “Live”
3 Cut!: The Imperative of Photographic Mediation
Interlude: I Don’t Go to the Movies
4 Home Sweet Intelligent Home
5 Sustainability, Self-Preservation, and Self-Mediation
6 Face-to-Facebook, or the Ethics of Mediation
7 Remediating Creativity: Performance, Invention, Critique
Conclusion: Creative Media Manifesto

Sarah Kember is Professor of New Technologies of Communication at
Goldsmiths, University of London, and author, most recently, of The
Optical Effects of Lightning.

Joanna Zylinska is Professor of New Media and Communications at
Goldsmiths, University of London, author of Bioethics in the Age of New
Media (MIT Press, 2009) and other books, and a fine-art photographer.

--
Professor Joanna Zylinska
Department of Media and Communications
Goldsmiths, University of London
http://www.joannazylinska.net

Artistic Director of the Festival of New Media and Video Transitio_MX05 in Mexico City in 2013


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