What is real in the twenty-first century, and how humans can navigate this shifting world.Despite a twenty-first-century plethora of images and our collective understanding that digital tools may alter the truth, human beings have a strong belief in the truth of the image: “pix or it didn’t happen.” But what does it mean when the image itself is fabricated? Or when AI is used to create audio or visual content that has the appearance of “truth” but is not, in fact, ...

This edited volume brings together scholars, teachers, journalists, activists, and filmmakers engaged in environmental communication and media studies to explore the constructions of primitive and wild spaces in our cultural creations of film, television, advertising, social media, infrastructure, and new technologies, among other media. Contributors present close analyses of a number of examples - including Indigenous social media activism, National Geographic, #VanLife content, ...

This edited collection highlights how people connected with friends and family, students and colleagues, and leaders and communities, in their quest to persevere during the pandemic. The chapters describe how people enjoyed their passions for the arts in new and unexpected ways, given the restrictions of COVID-19 safety protocols, and how scripted and reality television programming helped them escape, however briefly, from the traumas of the pandemic, the racial injustice, the political ma...

Interactive documentary is still an emerging field that eludes concise definitions or boundaries. Grounded in practice-based research, this collection seeks to expand the sometimes exclusionary field, giving voice to scholars and practitioners working outside the margins.Editors Kathleen M. Ryan and David Staton have curated a collection of chapters written by a global cohort of scholars to explore the ways that interactive documentary as a field of study reveals an even broader re...

Friends, Lovers, Co-Workers, and Community analyzes how television narratives form the first decade of the twenty-first century are powerful socializing agents which both define and limit the types of acceptable interpersonal relationships between co-workers, friends, romantic partners, family members, communities, and nations. This book is written by a diverse group of scholars who used a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches to interrogate the ways through which television...

Sitting prominently at the hearth of our homes, television serves as a voice of our modern time. Given our media-saturated society and television’s prominent voice and place in the home, it is likely we learn about our society and selves through these stories. These narratives are not simply entertainment, but powerful socializing agents that shape and reflect the world and our role in it. Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation brings together a diverse grou...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The visionary author of How to Do Nothing returns to challenge the notion that ‘time is money.’ . . . Expect to feel changed by this radical way of seeing.”—Esquire“One of the most important books I’ve read in my life.”—Ed Yong, author of An Immense WorldA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Chicago Public Library, Electric Lit

This book is an essential resource for media educators working to promote critical thinking, creativity, and civic engagement through their teaching. Connecting theory and research with creative projects and analyses of pop culture, it models an integrated and practical approach to media education.In order to prepare learners to successfully navigate rapid shifts in digital technology and popular culture, media educators in both secondary and university settings need to develop fre...

From mobile phones to surveillance cameras, from fracking to genetically modified food, we live in an age of intense debate about technology’s place in our culture. Culture and Technology is an essential guide to that debate and its fascinating history. It is a primer for beginners and an invaluable resource for those deeply committed to understanding the new digital culture. The award-winning first edition (2005) has been comprehensively updated to incorporate new technologies an...

How should we share the truth about the environmental crisis? At a moment when even the most basic facts about ecology and the climate face contestation and contempt, environmental advocates are at an impasse. Many have turned to social media and digital technologies to shift the tide. But what if their strategy is not only flawed, but dangerous?The Truth about Nature follows environmental actors as they turn to the internet to save nature. It documents how conservation ef...

Informatics of Domination is an experimental collection addressing formations of power that manifest through technical systems and white capitalist patriarchy in the twenty-first century. The volume takes its name from a chart in Donna J. Haraway’s canonical 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Haraway theorizes the informatics of domination as a feminist, diagrammatic concept for situating power and a world system from which the figure of the cyborg emerges. Informatics of D...

A proposal to redefine design in a way that not only challenges the field's dominant paradigms but also changes the practice of design itself.In Critical Fabulations, Daniela Rosner proposes redefining design as investigative and activist, personal and culturally situated, responsive and responsible. Challenging the field's dominant paradigms and reinterpreting its history, Rosner wants to change the way we historicize the practice, reworking it from the i...