[Commlist] New book: Negative Media

Announcing a new publication from Stanford University Press:


*Negative Media*

Erasureand the Limits of Retention

*Ella Klik*

*_https://mngbookshop.co.uk/9781503645264/negative-media/ 
<https://mngbookshop.co.uk/9781503645264/negative-media/>_*

*__*

*20% Discount code*: LSMNGUPS26*

*Valid until 11:59 GMT, 30^th  June 2026. Discount only applies to the 
MNG website.

"/Negative Media/ is a brilliant and necessary reckoning with the myths 
of digital permanence and the seductive fantasies of infinite memory. 
With historical and theoretical rigor, this book unravels the utopian 
pull of the digital cloud." —Mél Hogan, Queens University

  "/Negative Media/ offers an inspiring theoretical framework for 
examining the often-overlooked role of erasure in media technologies. A 
meaningful contribution for scholars in media studies, communication, 
science and technology studies, and digital humanities." —Nanna Bonde 
Thylstrup, University of Copenhagen

  In a world inundated by an endless proliferation of texts, images, 
and data, the tension between the human desire to preserve and the 
economic incentive to retain collides with the finite nature of storage 
and its attendant costs. The impulse to keep everything inevitably 
confronts material constraints, compelling a reckoning with erasure as a 
necessity that enables ongoing creation. As this book reveals, such 
considerations are far from unique to the digital age.

Spanning early analog sound recordings to contemporary debates about 
digital cloud solutions, /Negative Media/proposes that acts of removal, 
cutting, deletion, and effacement shape the invention and use of popular 
storage technologies from the 19th century to the present. Ella Klik 
invites readers to reconsider how recording mechanisms operate, arguing 
that negation is not a design flaw but a process intentionally woven 
into the very fabric of these systems. Through engaging stories, 
including the accidental deletion of the Apollo 11 moon landing tapes, 
the book traces a genealogy of undoing that reframes our understanding 
of media's lifecycle, from production to managing scarcity and 
abundance. Rather than privileging long-term retention as the primary 
framework for analysis, Klik navigates through media histories and 
theories to foreground reuse at a moment where prevailing narratives 
insist—perhaps too boldly—that nothing can ever truly disappear from the 
internet.

*Ella Klik* is an assistant professor in the graduate program of 
Hermeneutics & Culture at Bar-Ilan University.

*Stanford University Press | Sensing Media: Aesthetics, Philosophy, and 
Cultures of Media | 17 February 2026 | 224pp | 9781503645264 | PB | £22.99**

*Price subject to change.

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