A history of cinema’s role in popularizing the politics of Palestinian liberation

For decades, Arab American activists and allies have used film, video, and multimedia to mobilize support for the Palestinian cause in the United States. In this detailed history of cinema’s role within the broader solidarity movement, Umayyah Cable analyzes the various strands of cinematic activism that have helped move Palestinian liberation politics from the periphery and into the mainstream.

Cable charts the shifting discourse around Palestine as it has been shaped by grassroots film production and alternative media distribution networks as well as more conventional outlets. Ranging from the circulation of educational filmstrips by the Association of Arab American University Graduates in the 1970s to the treatment of Palestinian solidarity at contemporary Hollywood awards ceremonies and film festivals, Mainstreaming Palestine tells the story of how cinema has promoted Palestinian liberation and solidarity politics. While highlighting various public controversies and struggles against censorship, Cable also acknowledges the drawbacks of the Palestinian cause being subsumed by the mainstream, discussing how activism risks becoming fashionable, undermining the radical potential of the very tools that helped bring it there.

Combining archival research, ethnographic observation and interviews, text analysis, and visual analysis of film, video, and multimedia, Mainstreaming Palestine encourages readers to critically assess the relationship between the politics of liberation and the all-consuming engine of contemporary capitalism. By underscoring the impact of visual media on the evolution of the Palestinian solidarity discourse, this book offers both a treatise on the practical power of cinema and a necessary historicization of an urgent issue in American politics.

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This news ethnography brings to bear the overarching value clashes at play in a digital news world. The book argues that emergent news values are reordering the fundamental processes of news production. Immediacy, interactivity, and participation now play a role unlike any time before, creating clashes between old and new. These values emerge from the social practices, pressures, and norms at play inside the newsroom as journalists attempt to negotiate the new demands of their work. Immediacy forces journalists to work in a constant deadline environment, an ASAP world, but one where the vaunted traditions of yesterday's news still appear in the next day's print paper. Interactivity, inspired by the new user-computer directed capacities online and the immersive Web environment, brings new kinds of specialists into the newsroom, but exacts new demands upon the already taxed workflow of traditional journalists. And at time where social media presents the opportunity for new kinds of engagement between the audience and media, business executives hope for branding opportunities while journalists fail to truly interact with their readers.

The film star is not simply an actor but a historical phenomenon that derives from the production of an actor's attractiveness, the circulation of his or her name and likeness, and the support of media consumers. This book analyzes the establishment and transformation of the transnational film star system and the formations of historically important film stars—Japanese and non-Japanese—and casts new light on Japanese modernity as it unfolded between the 1910s and 1930s.

Hideaki Fujiki illustrates how film stardom and the star system emerged and evolved, touching on such facets as the production, representation, circulation, and reception of performers' images in films and other media. Examining several individual performers—particularly benshi narrators, Onoe Matsunosuke, Tachibana Teijiro, Kurishima Sumiko, Clara Bow, and Natsukawa Shizue—as well as certain aspects of different star systems that bolstered individual stardom, this study foregrounds the associations of contradictory, multivalent social factors that constituted modernity in Japan, such as industrialization, capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, and consumerism. Through its nuanced treatment of the production and consumption of film stars, this book shows that modernity is not a simple concept, but an intricate, contested, and paradoxical nexus of diverse social elements emerging in their historical contexts.

A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

Most of us learn about science from media coverage, and anyone seeking factual information on climate change, vaccine safety, genetically modified foods, or the dangers of peanut allergies has to sift through an avalanche of bogus assertions, misinformation, and carefully packaged spin. Cornelia Dean draws on thirty years of experience as a science reporter at the New York Times to expose the tricks that handicap readers with little background in science. She reveals how activists, business spokespersons, religious leaders, and talk show hosts influence the way science is reported and describes the conflicts of interest that color research. At a time when facts are under daily assault, Making Sense of Science seeks to equip nonscientists with a set of critical tools to evaluate the claims and controversies that shape our lives.

“Making Sense of Science explains how to decide who is an expert, how to understand data, what you need to do to read science and figure out whether someone is lying to you… If science leaves you with a headache trying to figure out what’s true, what it all means and who to trust, Dean’s book is a great place to start.”
—Casper Star-Tribune

“Fascinating… Its mission is to help nonscientists evaluate scientific claims, with much attention paid to studies related to health.”
—Seattle Times

“This engaging book offers non-scientists the tools to connect with and evaluate science, and for scientists it is a timely call to action for effective communication.”
—Times Higher Education

From universities to governments, the Big Five publishers to Amazon, the influence of institutions abounds in US publishing. A diverse array of books from around the globe have been made into world literature in the US, selected by editors, publishers, and bureaucrats, produced by non-profits and for-profit presses of all sizes, and distributed through schools, publishing programs, and bookstores. The resulting world literary canon is the product of complex negotiations between individual preferences and institutional mandates, as well as economic, cultural, and pedagogical logics. While book publishing has fallen increasingly under the sway of global capitalism, yet the literary world remains made up of a series of individuals making choices about whom to fund, teach, translate, edit, and publish. The “world” of world literature, Anna Muenchrath argues, is a heterogeneous network of people whose circulation of literature is necessarily imbricated in the market economy, but whose selections might resist that economy and open new literary futures. Through archival research and close readings, this book considers what those participating are trying to do in circulating a text, and what communities they are helping to form or strengthen.

Making World Literature posits that network theory can effectively model the agency of actors and institutions in the literary field, making visible both the long-term accrual of power, as well as the choices of authors, translators, editors, and readers who do not simply replicate the values of a global literary marketplace, but divert, question, and undermine them. Muenchrath closely examines the paratexts and archival documents surrounding moments of global circulation in and through institutions like US world literature anthologies, the Council of Books in Wartime, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Oprah’s Book Club, and Amazon’s translation imprint. The granularity of these case studies reveals the increasingly limited agency of the individual in the global literary field, demonstrating how such players are important actors, and how their choices open up further options for later actors seeking to take texts down new paths toward or after publication. 

When communication becomes the engine of white supremacist violence.

Manifesting Violence: White Terrorism, Digital Culture, and the Rhetoric of Replacement by Casey Ryan Kelly and William Joseph Sipe is a compelling exploration of how the digital world has become a fertile ground for white supremacist ideology. Through an in-depth analysis of white supremacist manifestos, online rhetoric, and the myth of “white genocide,” Kelly and Sipe uncover the disturbing ways in which digital culture facilitates the spread of racist ideology and the radicalization of individuals. By examining the language of white nationalism—calls to defend the white race, family, and children—Kelly and Sipe reveal how these messages, often disguised as entertainment or humor, gradually transform passive consumers into active participants in a dangerous ideology.

Manifesting Violence sheds light on the alarming shift from organized white supremacist groups to a decentralized digital arena where hate speech is disguised as humor and online conversations foster a culture of violence. Kelly and Sipe’s thorough investigation of this growing digital ecosystem offers a chilling glimpse into the dark underbelly of online extremism. A must-read for anyone seeking to understand the growing threat of hate-motivated violence and the urgent need to address its roots in digital culture, Kelly and Sipe offer rich insights to readers, researchers, academics, and policymakers concerned about extremism, online radicalization, and white supremacy.

There is little argument that mass media news projects a particular point of view. The question is how that bias is formed. Most media critics look to the attitudes of reporters and editors, the covert news policy of a publisher, or the outside pressures of politicians and advertisers. Manufacturing the News takes a different tack. Mark Fishman’s research shows how the routine methods of gathering news, rather than any hidden manipulators, determine the ideological character of the product.

News organizations cover the world mainly through “beats,” which tend to route reporters exclusively through governmental agencies and corporate bureaucracies in their search for news. Crime, for instance, is covered through the police and court bureaucracies; local politics through the meetings of the city council, county commissioners, and other official agencies. Reporters under daily deadlines come to depend upon these organizations for the predictable, steady flow of raw news material they provide.

It is part of the function of such bureaucracies to transform complex happenings into procedurally defined “cases.” Thus the information they produce for newsworkers represents their own bureaucratic reality. Occurrences which are not part of some bureaucratic phase are simply ignored. Journalists participate in this system by publicizing bureaucratic reality as hard fact, while accounts from other sources are treated as unconfirmed reports which cannot be published without time-consuming investigation.

Were journalists to employ different methods of news gathering, Fishman concludes, a different reality would emerge in the news—one that might challenge the legitimacy of prevailing political structures. But, under the traditional system, news reports will continue to support the interests of the status quo independently of the attitudes and intentions of reporters, editors, and news sources.

From ancient times to the present day, writers and thinkers have remarked on the unique power of music to evoke emotions, signal identity, and bond or divide entire societies, all without the benefit of literal representation. Even if we can't say precisely what our favorite melody means, we know very well what kind of effect it has on us, and on our friends and neighbors.

According to Aram Sinnreich, this power helps to explain why music has so often been regulated in societies around the globe and throughout history. Institutional authorities ranging from dynastic China's “Office to Harmonize Sounds” to today's copyright collecting societies like BMI and ASCAP leverage the rule of law and the power of the market to make sure that some musical forms and practices are allowed and others are prohibited.

Yet, despite the efforts of these powerful regulators, musical cultures consistently devise new and innovative ways to work around institutional regulations. These workarounds often generate new styles and traditions in turn, with effects far beyond the cultural sphere.

Mashed Up chronicles the rise of “configurability,” an emerging musical and cultural moment rooted in today's global, networked communications infrastructure. Based on interviews with dozens of prominent DJs, attorneys, and music industry executives, the book argues that today's battles over sampling, file sharing, and the marketability of new styles such as “mash-ups” and “techno” presage social change on a far broader scale. 

Specifically, the book suggests the emergence of a new ethic of configurable collectivism; an economic reunion of labor; a renegotiation of the line between public and private; a shift from linear to recursive logic; and a new “DJ consciousness,” in which the margins are becoming the new mainstream. Whether these changes are sudden or gradual, violent or peaceful, will depend on whether we heed the lessons of configurability, or continue to police and punish the growing ranks of the mashed up.

As United States television programs, movies, music, and other cultural products make their way around the globe, a vigorous debate over "cultural imperialism" is growing in many countries. This book brings together experts in economics, sociology, anthropology, the humanities, and communications to explore what effects the North American Free Trade Agreement will have on the flow of cultural products among Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

After an overview of free trade and the cultural industries, the book covers the following topics: dominance and resistance, cultural trade and identity in relation to Mexico and to French Canada, and intellectual property rights. Based on present trends, the contributors predict that there will be a steadily increasing flow of cultural products from the United States to its neighbors.

This book grew out of a 1994 conference that brought together leaders of the cultural industries, policy makers, and scholars. It represents state-of-the-art thinking about the global influence of U.S. cultural industries.

From the earliest depictions of Benjamin Franklin and his kite experiment to 21st-century renderings of mad scientists, representations of American scientists in the popular media reveal a great deal about our cultural hopes and fears. In an entertaining and insightful survey of popular media over three hundred years of American history—religious tracts, political cartoons, literature, theater, advertising, art, comic books, radio, music, television, and film—Glen Scott Allen examines the stereotypes assigned to scientists for what they tell us about America's pride in its technological achievements as well as our prejudices about certain “suspect” kinds of scientific investigation. 

Working in the tradition of cultural studies, Allen offers an analysis that is historically comprehensive and critically specific. Integrating both “high” literature and “low” comedy, he delves into the assumptions about scientists—good, bad, and mad—that have been shaped by and have in turn shaped American cultural forces. Throughout the book, his focus is on why certain kinds of scientists have been lionized as American heroes, while others have been demonized as anti-American villains. 

Allen demonstrates that there is a continuous thread running from the seminal mad scientists of Hawthorne's nineteenth-century fiction to modern megalomaniacs like Dr. Strangelove; that marketing was as important to the reputation of the great independent inventors as technological prowess was; and that cultural prejudices which can be traced all the way back to Puritan ideology are at work in modern scientific controversies over cloning and evolution. 

The periods and movements examined are remarkably far-ranging: the literature and philosophy of the Romantics; the technology fairs and utopian fiction of the nineteenth century; political movements of the 1930s and 1940s; the science fiction boom of the 1950s; the space and arms races of the 1960s and 1970s; the resurgence of pseudo-sciences in the 1980s and 1990s. This book will be of interest not just to teachers and students of cultural studies and the history of science and technology but to anyone interested in American culture and how it shapes our experience and defines our horizons.

An essential account of how the media devices we use today inherit the management practices governing factory labor

This book argues that management is enabled by media forms, just as media gives life to management. Media technologies central to management have included the stopwatch, the punch card, the calculator, and the camera, while management theories are taught in printed and virtual textbooks and online through TED talks. In each stage of the evolving relationship between workers and employers, management innovations are learned through media, with media formats producing fresh opportunities for management.

Drawing on rich historical and ethnographic case studies, this book approaches key instances of the industrial and service economy—the legacy of Toyotism in today’s software industry, labor mediators in electronics manufacturing in Central and Eastern Europe, and app-based food-delivery platforms in China—to push media and management studies in new directions. Media and Management offers a provocative insight on the future of labor and media that inevitably cross geographical boundaries.

How media shapes our actions and feelings about race
 

Amid fervent conversations about antiracism and police violence, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers vital new ideas about how our feelings about race are governed and normalized by our media landscape. Allison Page examines U.S. media from the 1960s to today, analyzing how media culture instructs viewers to act and feel in accordance with new racial norms created for an era supposedly defined by an end to legal racism.

From the classic television miniseries Roots to the edutainment video game Mission 2: Flight to Freedom and the popular website slaveryfootprint.org, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery provides an in-depth look at the capitalist and cultural artifacts that teach the U.S. public about slavery. Page theorizes media not only as a system of representation but also as a technology of citizenship and subjectivity, wherein race is seen as a problem to be solved. Ultimately, she argues that visual culture works through emotion, a powerful lever for shaping and managing racialized subjectivity. 

Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers compelling, provocative material and includes a wealth of archival research into such realms as news, entertainment, television, curricula, video games, and digital apps, providing new and innovative scholarship where none currently exists. 

Media backends--the electronics, labor, and operations behind our screens--significantly influence our understanding of the sociotechnical relations, economies, and operations of media. Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova, and Sander De Ridder assemble essays that delve into the evolving politics of the media infrastructural landscape. Throughout, the contributors draw on feminist, queer, and intersectional criticism to engage with infrastructural and industrial issues. This focus reflects a concern about the systemic inequalities that emerge when tech companies and designers fail to address workplace discrimination and algorithmic violence and exclusions. Moving from smart phones to smart dust, the essayists examine topics like artificial intelligence, human-machine communication, and links between digital infrastructures and public service media alongside investigations into the algorithmic backends at Netflix and Spotify, Google’s hyperscale data centers, and video-on-demand services in India.

A fascinating foray into an expanding landscape of media studies, Media Backends illuminates the behind-the-screen processes influencing our digital lives. 

Contributors: Mark Andrejevic, Philippe Bouquillion, Jonathan Cohn, Faithe J. Day, Sander De Ridder, Fatima Gaw, Christine Ithurbide, Anne Kaun, Amanda Lagerkvist, Alexis Logsdon, Stine Lomborg, Tim Markham, Vicki Mayer, Rahul Mukherjee, Kaarina Nikunen, Lisa Parks, Vibodh Parthasarathi, Philipp Seuferling, Ranjit Singh, Jacek Smolicki, Fredrik Stiernstedt, Matilda Tudor, Julia Velkova, and Zala Volcic

The media draws the cultural boundaries of our environmental imagination--and influences just who benefits. Murphy's analysis emphasizes social context, institutional alignments, and commercial media's ways of rendering discussion. He identifies and examines key terms, phrases, and metaphors as well as the ways consumers are presented with ideas like agency and the place of nature. What emerges is the link between pervasive messaging and an "environment" conjured by our media-saturated social imagination. As the author shows, today's complex, integrated media networks shape, frame, and deliver many of our underlying ideas about the environment. Increasingly--and ominously--individuals and communities experience these ideas not only in the developed world but in the increasingly consumption-oriented Global South.

Media, Culture, and Decolonization: Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana invites us to look at media and culture from a decolonial perspective. Through Dagbaŋ epistemologies and knowledge systems, this book examines media by highlighting how African languages, cultures, and traditions can shift how we think of knowledge. It is an offering to anyone curious about the relationship between culture, language, and media. By focusing on African language media in Ghana such as film, television, and radio, the book emphasizes the importance of espousing a decolonial politic and praxis in the process of co-creating knowledge with Indigenous communities. It connects the struggles of global majority countries and demonstrates the ways in which (neo)colonialism and imperialism impede the work toward liberatory futures. This book demonstrates the potential that African language media hold as tools of cultural and epistemological decolonization.

Written by an interdisciplinary group of experts, this edited collection addresses the mutual influence among disparate spheres of public life that enabled the media “Wild West” of the first post-Soviet decade. As a joint platform, the volume and the associated Multimedia Sourcebook of the Russian 1990s present the decade’s media cultures in a manner that reflects their historical interconnectedness and relationship to the global present.

Edited by Maya Vinokour with contributions from Bradley Gorski, Courtney Doucette, Fabrizio Fenghi, Rita Safariants, Daniil Leiderman, Thomas Keenan, and Pavel Khazanov.

Herman Wasserman analyzes the debates surrounding South Africa's new media presence against the backdrop of rapidly changing geopolitics. His exploration reveals how South African disputes regarding access to, and representation in, the media reflect the domination and inequality in the global communication sphere. Optimists see post-apartheid media as providing a vital space that encourages exchanges of opinion in a young democracy. Critics argue the public sphere mirrors South Africa's past divisions and privileges the viewpoints of the elite. Wasserman delves into the ways these simplistic narratives obscure the country's internal tensions, conflicts, and paradoxes even as he charts the diverse nature of South African entry into the global arena.

Media in Europe Today provides a comprehensive overview of European media in its current state of transformation. Through a focus on specific European media sectors, it assesses the impact of new technologies across industries and addresses a wide range of practices, strategies, and challenges facing European media today. The Euromedia Research Group has more than twenty years of experience in the observation of trends affecting media today, and this book marks the strong continuation of that long tradition.

The horrific events of October 7 and the devastating war in Gaza have brought Israel/Palestine to the headlines once again. We have seen this all play out before: another ambitious peace plan, which secured a ceasefire, is imagined as the dawn of a new era of peace in the Middle East. But is it? Critiquing traditional state-centered approaches to peace, which usually highlight the work of diplomats and politicians, and which historically failed miserably in Israel/Palestine, Media Making as Peacemaking shifts our attention to the experiences of ordinary people. Investigating the idea of media encounters, this book shows how the collaboration of Palestinian and Jewish media practitioners and the popular texts they create together in television dramas, digital activism and mainstream journalism offer a new and exciting way to think about peace . A peace which does not maintain a repressive status quo, but seeks to deliver equality and justice to all people, Palestinians and Jews, living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Using a sample of European newspapers and their TV listings as a stepping stone, Media, Markets and Public Spheres presents an overview of changes in European public spheres over the last fifty years. With in-depth analyses of structural changes in press and broadcasting, changing relations between media, and changes in media policies, this book explores how and why the media decisively influence most aspects of society. Media, Markets and Public Spheres will be useful to students in media and communication studies and European studies, as well as for those studying sociology and political science.

Award-winning author David J. Park argues that the battle against global warming is also a fight for media reform. With his new book Media Reform and the Climate Emergency: Rethinking Communication in the Struggle for a Sustainable Future, he critically examines how advertising, the digital infrastructure, and journalism advance the climate emergency and lays out a path of reform to help create a more sustainable world. The production and consumption of goods and services within consumer societies lead to unsustainable greenhouse gas emissions, and Park finds that much of mass communication is either dependent upon or closely tied to the success of this social organization. As a result, he suggests successful environmental movements creatively dismantle or reform institutional infrastructures that extend the planetary global warming crisis and the unsustainable consumption of nature.

Communication policies and industries are part of these infrastructures. Advertising evolved to propel a new consumer society that would encourage the over-consumption of goods and services with harmful and unsustainable production processes. Our digital infrastructure is largely premised upon the surveillance of online consumer habits and preferences, with the goal to create individualized messages to more effectively persuade people to increase their consumption habits. Much of commercial journalism resists the drastic and immediate regulatory changes necessary to address the worst aspects of this crisis. This is because so many of the needed changes challenge the media’s source of income, their libertarian philosophy, and the general status quo, which is preferred by elites. Bound to foster conversations among scholars, activists, politicians, and those who work in the communication industries, this book rethinks mass communication and highlights how immediate reform is needed in the struggle for a sustainable planet.

"This book is the perfect primer for understanding media in the digital age. We are in an era when newspaper, radio, and television are fast becoming archeological concepts. Herein are the reasons why."
---Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child and cofounder of the MIT Media Laboratory

"Congratulations to Neuman and colleagues for a fascinating exploration of how previous new media were constructed, whether things could have been otherwise, and what can be learned for future media."
---Sonia Livingstone, Department of Media and Communications, the London School of Economics and Political Science

In Media, Technology, and Society, some of the most prominent figures in media studies explore the issue of media evolution. Focusing on a variety of compelling examples in media history, ranging from the telephone to the television, the radio to the Internet, these essays collectively address a series of notoriously vexing questions about the nature of technological change. Is it possible to make general claims about the conditions that enable or inhibit innovation? Does government regulation tend to protect or thwart incumbent interests? What kinds of concepts are needed to address the relationship between technology and society in a nonreductive and nondeterministic manner? To what extent can media history help us to understand and to influence the future of media in constructive ways? The contributors' historically grounded responses to these questions will be relevant to numerous fields, including history, media and communication studies, management, sociology, and information studies.

W. Russell Neuman is John Derby Evans Professor of Media Technology and Research Professor, Center for Political Studies, Institute for Social Research, at the University of Michigan.

DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS: a collaborative imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library

Media studies courses, particularly introductory courses, are often narrowly focused on US and Western European canons. Instructors for introductory media studies courses wishing to expand the offerings in their curricula will find in these essays new ways of approaching foundational concepts and issues in the field, including globalization, social difference, and diverse media cultures. Scholars wishing to expand their research into specific media forms or representational issues can also turn to these case studies for approaches from beyond the US. By including a variety of media and several geographical areas, the collection introduces readers to the formal, technological, and cultural diversity of global media studies.

Edited by Juan Llamas-Rodriguez with contributions from Anthony Adah and Añulika Agina, Maria Corrigan, Benjamin Han, Anna Shah Hoque, Meryem Kamil, Angelica Marie Lawson, Lilia Adriana Perez Limon, Sonia Robles, Kuhu Tanvir, David Tenorio, and Rachel van der Merwe.

The Media Welfare State: Nordic Media in the Digital Era comprehensively addresses the central dynamics of the digitalization of the media industry in the Nordic countries—Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland—and the ways media organizations there are transforming to address the new digital environment. Taking a comparative approach, the authors provide an overview of media institutions, content, use, and policy throughout the region, focusing on the impact of information and communication technology/internet and digitalization on the Nordic media sector. Illustrating the shifting media landscape the authors draw on a wide range of cases, including developments in the press, television, the public service media institutions, and telecommunication.

This pioneering monograph provocatively explodes current research paradigms for the modern and the medieval by showing that Twitter shares key similarities with medieval literary forms, texts, and narrative techniques. Analyzing tweets with medieval texts, and vice versa, Spencer-Hall initiates readers into an innovative methodology of interdisciplinary literary criticism, posing vital questions about the politics of medievalism today. Chapters include brand-new readings of The Owl and the Nightingale, the Chastelaine de Vergi, and Marie de France’s Laüstic, and arresting insights into troubadour style, Margery Kempe, and #MedievalTwitter. The book culminates in a medieval(ist) reading of Twitter’s premature demise, and Elon Musk’s medievalism. Throughout, points of contact and divergence are dissected, re-contextualizing the socio-cultural meaning of communication and texts across the temporal divide.

These lively and accessible essays expand the conversation in the blogosphere about the novels and films by connecting the controversies about gender roles to social trends in the real world.

The death of the daily newspaper in the internet age has been predicted for decades. While print newspapers are struggling from drops in advertising and circulation, their survival has been based on original reporting. Instead of a death knell, metro dailies are experiencing an identity crisis—a clash between traditional print journalism’s formality and detail and digital journalism’s informality and brevity.  

In Metro Dailies in the Age of Multimedia Journalism, Mary Lou Nemanic provides in-depth case studies of five mid-size city newspapers to show how these publications are adapting to the transition from print-only to multiplatform content delivery—and how newsroom practices are evolving to address this change. She considers the successes when owners allow journalists to manage their newspapers—to ensure production of quality journalism under the protection of newspaper guilds—as well as how layoffs and resource cutbacks have jeopardized quality standards.

Arguing for an integrated approach in which print and online reporting are considered complementary and visual journalism is emphasized across platforms, Nemanic suggests that there is a future for the endangered daily metro newspaper.

An interdisciplinary study charting the war against microbial futures leads to a new theory of contemporary vision and visuality
 

In 1989, a group of U.S. government scientists met to discuss some surprising findings: new diseases were appearing around the world, and viruses that they thought long vanquished were resurfacing. Their appearance heralded a future perpetually threatened by unforeseeable biological risks, sparking a new concept of disease: the “emerging microbe.” With the Cold War nearing its end, American scientists and security experts turned to confront this new “enemy,” redirecting national security against its risky horizons. In order to be fought, emerging microbes first needed to be made perceptible; but how could something immaterial, unknowable, and ever mutating be coaxed into visibility, knowability, and operability?

Microbial Resolution charts the U.S.-led war on the emerging microbe to show how their uncertain futures were transformed into objects of global science and security. Moving beyond familiar accounts that link scientific knowledge production to optical practices of visualizing the invisible, Gloria Chan-Sook Kim develops a theory of “microbial resolution” to analyze the complex problematic that arises when dealing with these entities: what can be seen when there is nothing to see? Through a syncretic analysis of data mining, animal-tracking technologies, media networks, computer-modeled futures, and global ecologies and infrastructures, she shows how a visual impasse—the impossibility of seeing microbial futures—forms the basis for new modes of perceiving, knowing, and governing in the present.

Timely and thought provoking, Microbial Resolution opens up the rich paradoxes, irreconcilabilities, and failures inherent in this project and demonstrates how these tensions profoundly animate twenty-first-century epistemologies, aesthetics, affects, and ecologies.

In the early 1980s, the scrappy radio station 93.3 WMMR was on the verge of a major takeover of the Philadelphia airwaves. Erin Riley, who had her finger on the pulse of new artists like Bon Jovi, whose music would define a generation, was hired as the station’s Music Director in 1983.

The Mighty WMMR is Riley’s affectionate and nostalgic oral history of the station’s early years, especially its 1980s heyday, covering everything from the pioneering influence of The Marconi Experiment and the success of The Morning Zoo to how WMMR broke artists like Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and local favorites The Hooters onto the national scene. Featuring anecdotes and memories by beloved on-air personalities including John DeBella, Pierre Robert, and Michael Tearson, Riley chronicles the memorable songs and musicians; concerts, contests, and clubs; and the live broadcasts that marked the height of an unforgettable era in Philadelphia radio.

Riley breezily captures the station’s impact on listeners, which made WMMR a perfect storm of the times, the culture, and the counterculture. The Mighty WMMR is a captivating look back at Philadelphia’s rock history and the station that shaped a city and a generation.

With the rise of drones and computer-controlled weapons, the line between war and video games continues to blur. In this book, the authors trace how the realities of war are deeply inflected by their representation in popular entertainment. War games and other media, in turn, feature an increasing number of weapons, tactics, and threat scenarios from the War on Terror.

While past analyses have emphasized top-down circulation of pro-military ideologies through government public relations efforts and a cooperative media industry, The Military-Entertainment Complex argues for a nonlinear relationship, defined largely by market and institutional pressures. Tim Lenoir and Luke Caldwell explore the history of the early days of the video game industry, when personnel and expertise flowed from military contractors to game companies; to a middle period when the military drew on the booming game industry to train troops; to a present in which media corporations and the military influence one another cyclically to predict the future of warfare.

In addition to obvious military-entertainment titles like America’s Army, Lenoir and Caldwell investigate the rise of best-selling franchise games such as Call of Duty, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, and Ghost Recon. The narratives and aesthetics of these video games permeate other media, including films and television programs. This commodification and marketing of the future of combat has shaped the public’s imagination of war in the post-9/11 era and naturalized the U.S. Pentagon’s vision of a new way of war.