Media, Modernity and Technology The Geography of the New

From best-selling author David Morley, this book presents a set of interlinked essays which discuss and examine some of the key debates in the fields of media and cultural studies. Spanning the last decade, this fascinating and readable book is based on interdisciplinary work on the interface of mediaandcultural studies, cultural geography and anthropology. Clearly structured in five thematic sections, the book surveys the potential contribution of art-based discourses to the field and offers critical perspectives on the emergence of the ‘new media’ of our age. Including discussion on the status and future of media and cultural studies as disciplines, the significance of technology and new media, and raising questions about the place of the magical in the newly emerging forms of techno-modernity in which we live today, this is a media student must-read.

Introduction Part 1:Disciplinary Dilemmas: Canons and Orthodoxies 1.So-Called Cultural Studies: Dead Ends and Reinvented Wheels 2. Cultural Studies and Media Studies: Contexts, Coundaries and Politics Part 2:Methodological Matters: Interdisciplinary Approaches3.Methodological Problems and Research Practices: Opening up the Black Box 4.Visions of the Real: The Ethnographic Arts Part 3:The Geography of Modernity and the Orientation of the Future5. EurAm, Modernity, Reason and Alterity: After the West?6. Beyond Global Abstraction: Regional Theory and the Spatialisation of History Part 4:Domesticity, Mediation and the Technologies of 'Newness' 7. Public Issues and Intimate Histories: Mediation, Domestication and Dis-Location 8. Rhetorics of the Technological Sublime: the Paradoxes of Technical Rationality Part 5: Techno-Anthropology: Icons, Totems and Fetishes 9. Television: not so much a Visual Medium, more a Visible Object 10. Magical Technologies: the New, the Shiny and the Symbolic Coda 11. Marvels and Wonders: Modernity, Tradition and Technology

David Morley