edited by Tasha Oren and Patrice Petro
contributions by Sandra Braman, Brian Larkin, Annabelle Sreberny, Anne Ciecko, Timothy Taylor, Anna Everett, Lenny Foner, Toby Miller, Peter Sands, Steve Jones, Jerome Bourdon and Susan Ohmer
Rutgers University Press, 2004
eISBN: 978-0-8135-7911-5 | Paper: 978-0-8135-3480-0 | Cloth: 978-0-8135-3479-4
Library of Congress Classification P96.T42G58 2004
Dewey Decimal Classification 302.23

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK

Rhetoric about media technology tends to fall into two extreme categories: unequivocal celebration or blanket condemnation.  This is particularly true in debate over the clash of values when first world media infiltrate third world audiences.

Bringing together the best new work on contemporary media practices, technologies, and policies, the essayists in Global Currents argue that neither of these extreme views accurately represents the role of media technology today. New ways of thinking about film, television, music, and the internet demonstrate that it is not only media technologies that affect the cultures into which they are introduced—it is just as likely that the receiving culture will change the media.

Topics covered in the volume include copyright law and surveillance technology, cyber activism in the African Diaspora, transnational monopolies and local television industries, the marketing and consumption of  “global music,” “click politics” and the war on Afghanistan, the techno-politics of distance education, artificial intelligence and global legal institutions, and traveling and “squatting” in digital space. Balanced between major theoretical positions and original field research, the selections address the political and cultural meanings that surround and configure new technologies.