[Commlist] new book: Media Hot and Cold

*Media Hot and Cold*

*Nicole Starosielski***

https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781478014546/media-hot-and-cold/ 
<https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781478014546/media-hot-and-cold/>

*__*

*Receive a 20% discount online*:*

*CSLF2021*

*Valid until 11:59 GMT, 30^th June 2022. Discount only applies to the 
CAP website.

“Nicole Starosielski awakens our senses from their thermal slumber. Hot 
and cool, warm and cold are not only metaphors; they shape worlds. I 
finished this book with the caloric throb of the universe humming in my 
ears. Starosielski’s media analysis is wonderfully both elemental and 
critical: temperature reveals both ontology and injustice. /Media Hot 
and Cold/invites us to a noncoercive rearrangement of affect.”*—John 
Durham Peters, Yale University*

“In this dynamic and intellectually dazzling book, Nicole Starosielski 
grapples with complex technical principles of communication while 
framing them as historically and culturally conditioned and as 
politically and economically motivated. Starosielski’s reconsideration 
of foundational communication models—looking beyond sender-receiver 
toward a more ambient and atmospheric sensibility—is necessary in an age 
when ubiquitous, continuous computing is fundamentally altering the 
atmosphere that hosts its signals. /Media Hot and Cold/is a model of 
innovative and masterful interdisciplinarity.”*—Shannon Mattern, author 
of**/A City is not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences/*

In /Media Hot and Cold/Nicole Starosielski examines the cultural 
dimensions of temperature to theorize the ways heat and cold can be used 
as a means of communication, subjugation, and control. Diving into the 
history of thermal media, from infrared cameras to thermostats to 
torture sweatboxes, Starosielski explores the many meanings and messages 
of temperature. During the twentieth century, heat and cold were 
broadcast through mass thermal media. Today, digital thermal media such 
as bodily air conditioners offer personalized forms of thermal 
communication and comfort. Although these new media promise to help 
mitigate the uneven effects of climate change, Starosielski shows how 
they can operate as a form of biopower by determining who has the 
ability to control their own thermal environment. In this way, thermal 
media can enact thermal violence in ways that reinforce racialized, 
colonial, gendered, and sexualized hierarchies. By outlining how the 
control of temperature reveals power relations, Starosielski offers a 
framework to better understand the dramatic transformations of hot and 
cold media in the twenty-first century.

*Nicole Starosielski*is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and 
Communication at New York University, author of /The Undersea Network/, 
and coeditor /of Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media/, both also 
published by Duke University Press.

*Duke University Press | Elements | December 2021 | 304pp 
| 9781478014546 | PB | £20.99**

*Price subject to change.

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