Media, mortality and necro-technologies: Eulogies for dead media

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110279
Author(s):  
Bjørn Nansen ◽  
Hannah Gould ◽  
Michael Arnold ◽  
Martin Gibbs
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Sound System ◽  
Death Studies ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Care Industry ◽  
Death Care ◽  
By Products ◽  
Human Death ◽  
Funeral Industry

Working at the intersection of death studies and media studies, this article examines what we can learn from the death of media technologies designed for the deceased, what we refer to as necro-technologies. Media deaths illuminate a tension between the promise of persistence and realities of precariousness embodied in all media. This tension is, however, more visibly strained by the mortality of technologies designed to mediate and memorialise the human dead by making explicit the limitations of digital eternity implied by products in the funeral industry. In this article, we historicise and define necro-technologies within broader discussions of media obsolescence and death. Drawing from our funeral industry fieldwork, we then provide four examples of recently deceased necro-technologies that are presented in the form of eulogies. These eulogies offer a stylised but culturally significant format of remembrance to create an historical record of the deceased and their life. These necro-technologies are the funeral attendance robot CARL, the in-coffin sound system CataCombo, the posthumous messaging service DeadSocial and the digital avatar service Virtual Eternity. We consider what is at stake when technologies designed to enliven the human deceased – often in perpetuity – are themselves subject to mortality. We suggest a number of entangled economic, cultural and technical reasons for the failure of necro-technologies within the specific contexts of the death care industry, which may also help to highlight broader forces of mortality affecting all media technologies. These are described as misplaced commercial imaginaries, cultural reticence and material impermanence. In thinking about the deaths of necro-technologies, and their causes, we propose a new form of death, a ‘material death’ that extends beyond biological, social and memorial forms of human death already established to account for the finitude of media materiality and memory.

scholarly journals Media Studies, Audiovisual Media Communications, and Generations: The Case of Budding Journalists in Radio Courses in Greece

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-192
Author(s):  
Constantinos Nicolaou ◽  
Maria Matsiola ◽  
Christina Karypidou ◽  
Anna Podara ◽  
Rigas Kotsakis ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Adult Education ◽  
Adult Learners ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Educational Communication ◽  
Teaching Methodology ◽  
Technology Enhanced Learning ◽  
Generational Theory ◽  
Audiovisual Media ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Media Communications

In this article, the quality of media studies education through effective teaching utilizing audiovisual media technologies and audiovisual content (audiovisual media communications) to budding journalists as adult learners (18 years and older) is researched, with results primarily intended for application in radio lessons at all educational levels and disciplines (including adult education). Nowadays, audiovisual media communications play an important role in the modern and visual-centric way of our life, while they require all of us to possess multiple-multimodal skills to have a successful professional practice and career, and especially those who study media studies, such as tomorrow’s new journalists. Data were collected after three interactive teachings with emphasis on educational effectiveness in technology-enhanced learning, through a specially designed written questionnaire with a qualitative and quantitative form (evaluation form), as case study experiments that applied qualitative action research with quasi-experiments. The results (a) confirmed (i) the theory of audiovisual media in education, as well as (ii) the genealogical characteristics and habits of budding journalists as highlighted in basic generational theory, something which appears to be in agreement with findings of previous studies and research; and (b) showed that (i) teaching methodology and educational techniques aimed primarily at adult learners in adult education kept the interest and attention of the budding journalists through the use of such specific educational communication tools as audiovisual media technologies, as well as (ii) sound/audio media, as audiovisual content may hold a significant part in a lecture.

Beyond the Phantom Public

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony M. Nadler
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
News Media ◽  
Interactive Media ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Media System ◽  
Critical Media ◽  
The Media ◽  
To Come ◽  
Point To Point

This concluding chapter discusses the intellectual resources of critical media studies and applies them to debates about the future of news. The changes taking place in news media concern not only content but the very modes through which people engage the media in everyday life, as well as the ways media connect individuals to larger communities. Although interactive media is not inherently destined to level hierarchies of power, it is certainly possible that societal appropriations of new media technologies could mean a reworking of the infrastructure that regulates which ideas and visions circulate from point to point in the media system. The issue lies in how crucial decisions at this critical juncture will be made and what course they will set for the years to come.

Coming to Mind

2013 ◽  
pp. 550-563
Author(s):  
Paul Morris ◽  
Susanna Paasonen
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Sexual Subculture

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. Pornography aims to capture and mediate some of the intensity and immediacy of sex. This is particularly manifest in the framework of gay bareback pornography that both documents a sexual subculture and caters to a particular porn audience. Structured as a dialogue between a bareback porn producer and a media studies scholar, the essay combines practice-based insights with more conventional scholarly argumentation in a discussion on the modality of pornography, as well as on the transformations that digital media technologies have inflicted in its production and consumption. The chapter addresses the visceral force of pornography while paying particular attention on the centrality of sound in the mediation of intensity.

scholarly journals Knowledge Experiments: Technology and the Library

2012 ◽  
pp. 101-119
Author(s):  
Paulina Mickiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Central Nervous System ◽  
Nervous System ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Public Knowledge ◽  
Decentralized Networks ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
A Site

The 21st century library has become a central nervous system for new and emergent media technologies, a site that centralizes increasingly decentralized networks and systems, and a localizable place in which new and emergent media technologies have not only found a home, an embodied place where they can be contained, but also a broader site in which the encounter between citizens, public knowledge and culture is staged. This article seeks to explore the “technologization” of the library. More specifically, it examines how this process of “technologization” has transformed the ways we use and understand the library as a public space and what this means for its future. The idea of the library as an important medium in itself has been overlooked in the broader context of communication and media studies.

Media Technologies in Communication and Critical Cultural Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ned O'Gorman
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Machine Learning ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Cultural Processes ◽  
The Relationship

Media technologies are at the heart of media studies in communication and critical cultural studies. They have been studied in too many ways to count and from a wide variety of perspectives. Yet fundamental questions about media technologies—their nature, their scope, their power, and their place within larger social, historical, and cultural processes—are often approached by communication and critical cultural scholars only indirectly. A survey of 20th- and 21st-century approaches to media technologies shows communication and critical cultural scholars working from, for, or against “deterministic” accounts of the relationship between media technologies and social life through “social constructivist” understandings to “networked” accounts where media technologies are seen embedding and embedded within socio-material structures, practices, and processes. Recent work on algorithms, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and platforms, together with their manifestations in the products and services of monopolistic corporations like Facebook and Google, has led to new concerns about the totalizing power of digital media over culture and society.

Afterword II

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mara Mills ◽  
Jonathan Sterne
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Cross Pollination ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Critical Media Studies ◽  
Critical Media ◽  
The Cross

Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne, leading scholars of media technologies who have long incorporated disability into their analyses, propose “dismediation” as one avenue for the cross-pollination of media and disability studies. Referencing current scholarship in both fields, and engaging with a rich tradition of critical media studies, they argue that “dismediation” understands disability and media as mutually constitutive and thus enables new directions for the study of media and technologies.

scholarly journals The production of knowledge in Brazilian social movement families

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 60-73
Author(s):  
Paola Sartoretto ◽  
Leonardo Custdio
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Unit Of Analysis ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Circulation Of Knowledge ◽  
Media Practices ◽  
Communicative Processes

Analyses of the interplay between media technologies and social movements have been predominantly media-centric, focusing on practices and orientations towards media. Studies looking into communication and media practices within social movements usually have the single social movement as a unit of analysis, overlooking relations and interactions among social movements. We shift the focus to practices and orientations towards media, and to communicative processes among social movement families. The study pays particular attention to communication related to the production and circulation of knowledge. Through the study of the interrelations among three social movements in Brazil, we propose a typology of knowledge constructed and circulated within and among social movements as related to 1) militancy and insurgency, 2) mobilisation dynamics, and 3) framing awareness.

Mass Mediating Diaspora: Iranian Exile Culture in Los Angeles

1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-331
Author(s):  
David Kazanjian ◽  
Anahid Kassabian
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
International Media ◽  
Surplus Labor ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Transnational Media ◽  
Literature History ◽  
The One

In this most recent era of transnational movements of labor, commodity, capital, and information, distinctions among cultures and conditions of exile, diaspora, nationality, ethnicity, and race are both elusive and in need of elucidation. That need is particularly strong when such cultures and conditions are articulated in and through mass media. Studies of globalization and transnational media corporations in communications and media studies have rarely examined the continuing legacies of colonialism and imperialism. In turn, studies of postcoloniality, whose strongest disciplinary connections have been to literature, history, and anthropology, have been noticeably reluctant to address the realm of mass-mediated culture. Yet postcoloniality is routinely animated by the political economy and representational practices of mass-media technologies. Consider how the following mass mediated representations weave a tangled web of postcolonial relations. On the one hand, the nuclear bomb-toting terrorists of the “Crimson Jihad” in the recent blockbuster movie True Lies represent “peoples of the ‘Middle East’ ” by violently condensing Armenians, Turks, Lebanese, and Azeris along with, for example, Palestinians, Libyans, and Iranians. On the other hand, Armenian and Azeri war tactics in Karabakh are partly driven by international media coverage while that same war is consumed through mass media in Long Island and Los Angeles. To complicate the picture even further, Los Angeles-based institutions of mass media are driven by that city’s surplus labor pool of working-class immigrants from the “South.”

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