[ecrea] New book: Phase Media: space, time and the politics of smart objects

*Phase Media: space, time and the politics of smart objects*
Bloomsbury Press, New York (2017)
*James Ash*
*
*
In Phase Media, James Ash theorizes how smart objects, understood as 
Internet-connected and sensor-enabled devices, are altering users' 
experience of their environment. Rather than networks connected by lines 
of transmission, smart objects generate phases, understood as 
space-times that modulate the spatio-temporal intelligibility of both 
humans and non-humans. Examining a range of objects and services from 
the Apple Watch to Nest Cam to Uber, Ash suggests that the modulation of 
spatio-temporal intelligibility is partly shaped by the commercial 
logics of the industries that design and manufacture smart objects, but 
can also exceed them.

Drawing upon the work of Martin Heidegger, Gilbert Simondon and Bruno 
Latour, Ash argues that smart objects have their own phase politics, 
which offer opportunities for new forms of public to emerge. Phase 
Media develops a conceptual vocabulary to contend that smart objects do 
more than just enabling a world of increased corporate control and 
surveillance, as they also provide the tools to expose and re-order the 
very logics and procedures that created them.


*Reviews*

“James Ash's Phase Media offers a new way to conceptualize how smart 
objects are becoming part of and active in our lives, environments and 
the processes of change that characterize the contemporary world. 
Providing a welcome alternative to network and new materialist 
approaches, Ash invites us to consider how smart objects themselves are 
implicated and active in constituting everyday worlds and change 
processes. In doing so it provokes new theoretical imaginaries of what 
smart objects are, how they might impact on our lives, and the 
implications of this for ethical technological futures. This book is 
essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how smart 
technologies are emerging as part of our contemporary and near future 
worlds.” – Sarah Pink, Distinguished Professor of Design and Media 
Ethnography, RMIT University, Australia

“With Ash's Phase Media, the fallibility of the autonomous system comes 
sharply into view. A compelling account of the perturbations of 
apparently 'smart' devices.” – Louise Amoore, Professor of Political 
Geography, Durham University, UK

Further information: 
_https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/phase-media-9781501335624/_


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