New books

Courtesy of a trip to the National Communication Association conference in Washington. DC. Some new books.

Andre Jansson and Miyase Christensen (2014) Media, Surveillance, and Identity: Social Perspectives. Peter Lang. A great collection, deals with social media, politics, consumerism, etc. Nice pieces by David Lyon on the culture of surveillance, Mark Andrejevic on debt, Lee Humphreys on social networks and surveillance, ad many others.

William G. Staples (2014). Everyday Surveillance: Vigilance and Visibility in Postmodern Life (2nd edition). Rowman and Littlefield.  An extensive update of a key text for surveillance studies. Looking forward to reading it.

Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, Cornelius Puschmann (eds) (2014) Twitter and Society. Peter Lang. Aims to be "the" book on Twitter studies and really does encompass the range of research. Nice use of Paul Klee's Twittering Machine on the cover!

Ethan Thomson and Jason Mittell (eds) (2013) How to Watch Television. NYU Press. Nice, useful collection of critical perspectives and issues, each done in a short chapter focusing on a different TV show.

Must find other things to blog about besides book acquisitions.

In the meantime, there it is.

Yet more books

Less than two weeks to go until the start of semester, with a To-Do list as long as my arm, and these drop into my mailbox (OK, not unbidden, I did order them).

New books I really wish I had time to read right now:

Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Harvard.

Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso.

Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command. Bloomsbury.

Shoshana Magnet, When Biometrics Fail:  Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity. Duke.

Pulp Surveillance

Of the more voyeuristic variety. 1963 (first paperback edition, originally published in 1961).

New Book

Just got a copy of Graham Harman's Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012, Zero Books) because I promised to write a paper on Lovecraft and Deleuze that's due next Fall. Harman's argument is that Lovecraft's work has presented a particular body of inspiration to the Speculative Realist philosophers. So it will be interesting to see what Harman makes of Lovecraft. I will be doing other things with Lovecraft, but that's all well and good. I actually began to realize that I really liked Deleuze and Guattari when I starting finding all the Lovecraft references in Mille Plateau.

New FlowTV column on Google Glass

My third, and final, column for FlowTV is now online:
http://flowtv.org/2013/04/re-framing-google-glass/

It's a return to the discussion of Glass, but in particular I wanted to look at the narrative about Glass presented by their recent public relations video. It's not about the possibilities of Glass itself, but how these media texts seem to be emphasizing certain features over others.

New books

Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory

Rob Shields and Eric Vallee, Demystifying Deleuze: An Introductory Assemblage of Crucial Concepts

Stanislaw Lem (trans J. Zylinska) Summa Technologiae

Nikolas Rose and Joelle M Abi-Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind

Ulrik Ekman (ed) Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing

Rich Ling, Taken for Grantedness: The Embedding of Mobile Communication Into Society [Just set this as one of the texts for my fall grad class in Comm and Tech]

Cara Wallis, Technomobility in China

I should give more information, like publishers, summaries, and such, but I ain't got time.

New Visualities, New Technologies

My book, co-edited with Hille Koskela at the University of Finland, is now out! New Visualities, New Technologies: The New Ecstasy of Communication. Ashgate.

http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409403579

Contents: Introduction: ecstatic assemblages of visuality, J. Macgregor Wise; Ecstatic updates: Facebook, identity and the fractal subject, Mark Nunes; Mapping Narbs, Ananda Mitra; Will the real digital girl please stand up?: examining the gap between policy dialogue and girls’ accounts of their digital existence, Jane Bailey and Valerie Steeves; Vision, inertia, and the mobile telephone: on the origins of control space and the spread of sociopolitical cybernetics, John Armitage; 'Right to the image’: images of dignity, representations of humiliation, Hille Koskela; Frames of discontent: social media, mobile intimacy, and the boundaries of media practice, Larissa Hjorth; Creativity on display? Visibility conflicts or the claim for opacity as ethical resource, Ursula Anna Frohne; Performative pictures: camera phones at the ready, Brooke A. Knight; Mobile snapshots: pictorial communication in the age of tertiary orality, Dong-Hoo Lee; Sex, spectatorship, and the ‘Neda’ video: a biopsy, Theresa M. Senft; Index.

Geek Cred

1984: Behind the Scenes

Interesting article in the Telegraph on the biographical connections in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

New books

Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance (2013, Polity)

Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things (2012, Wiley)

McKenzie Wark, Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class (2012, Polity)

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Given my interests in both old books and surveillance, this seemed a natural (if expensive) addition to the collection.

First printing, first American edition.