BiblioVault - Books about Media Studies

Vector Media

Leonardo Impett

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

Dispelling the notion of “generative” AI

Neural networks are designed to dissolve all media into the vector space—a universal space of commensurability. In Vector Media, Leonardo Impett and Fabian Offert parse theories of automatic vision to trace contemporary artificial intelligence’s technical ideology of epistemic reduction, where sensory data is turned into abstracted forms of meaning. Under this regime, bias is not just a question of what is represented but of the logic of representation itself. Drawing on Phil Agre’s notion of a critical technical practice, Vector Media reveals how artificial intelligence systems embed new epistemologies of media beneath the surface of their architectures.

Analyzing the techniques underpinning large multimodal artificial intelligence models like DALL-E, Midjourney, Flux, or Stable Diffusion, Impett and Offert offer the concept of neural exchange value: the value cultural artifacts acquire not through meaning or context but through their capacity to function as vectors. In such a system, commensurability becomes a condition of existence: what matters is not what something is but that it can be embedded. Rather than focusing solely on datasets, Vector Media proposes a critical study of vector spaces—and the machine cultures they produce—as a necessary complement to prevailing approaches in AI critique.

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Very Special Episodes

Televising Industrial and Social Change

Jonathan Cohn

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Very Special Episodes examines how the quintessential “very special episode” format became a primary way in which the television industry responded to and shaped social change, cultural traumas, and industrial transformations. With essays covering shows ranging from the birth of Desi Arnaz, Jr. on I Love Lucy to contemporary examples such as a delayed episode of Black-ish and the streaming-era phenomenon of the “Very Special Seasons” of UnReal and 13 Reasons Why, this collection seriously and critically uses the “very special episode” to chart the history of American television and its self-identified status as an arbiter of culture.

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Vidding

A History

Francesca Coppa

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Vidding is a well-established remix practice where fans edit an existing film, music video, TV show, or other performance and set it to music of their choosing. Vids emerged forty years ago as a complicated technological feat involving capturing footage from TV with a VCR and syncing with music—and their makers and consumers were almost exclusively women, many of them queer women. The technological challenges of doing this kind of work in the 1970s and 1980s when vidding began gave rise to a rich culture of collective work, as well as conventions of creators who gathered to share new work and new techniques. While the rise of personal digital technology eventually democratized the tools vidders use, the collective aspect of the culture grew even stronger with the advent of YouTube, Vimeo, and other channels for sharing work.

Vidding: A History emphasizes vidding as a critical, feminist form of fan practice. Working outward from interviews, VHS liner notes, convention programs, and mailing list archives, Coppa offers a rich history of vidding communities as they evolved from the 1970s through to the present. Built with the classroom in mind, the open-access electronic version of this book includes over one-hundred vids and an appendix that includes additional close readings of vids.

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Videogames and Art

Second Edition

Edited by Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell

Intellect Books, 2013

Videogames are firmly enmeshed in modern culture. Acknowledging the increasing cultural impact of this rapidly changing industry on artistic and creative practices, Videogames and Art features in-depth essays that offer an unparalleled overview of the field.

Together, the contributions position videogame art as an interdisciplinary mix of digital technologies and the traditional art forms. Of particular interest in this volume are machinima, game console artwork, politically oriented videogame art, and the production of digital art. This new and revised edition features an extended critical introduction from the editors and updated interviews with the foremost artists in the field. Rounding out the book is a critique of the commercial videogame industry comprising essays on the current quality and originality of videogames.

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The View from Somewhere

Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity

Lewis Raven Wallace

University of Chicago Press, 2019

A look at the history and myth of the objective journalist and how this ideal has been used to silence marginalized voices.

In The View from Somewhere, Lewis Raven Wallace dives deep into the history of “objectivity” in journalism and how its been used to gatekeep and silence marginalized writers as far back as Ida B. Wells. At its core, this is a book about fierce journalists who have pursued truth and transparency and sometimes been punished for it—not just by tyrannical governments but by journalistic institutions themselves. He highlights the stories of journalists who question “objectivity” with sensitivity and passion: Desmond Cole of the Toronto Star; New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse; Pulitzer Prize-winner Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah; Peabody-winning podcaster John Biewen; Guardian correspondent Gary Younge; former Buzzfeed reporter Meredith Talusan; and many others. Wallace also shares his own experiences as a midwestern transgender journalist and activist who was fired from his job as a national reporter for public radio for speaking out against “objectivity” in coverage of Trump and white supremacy.

With insightful steps through history, Wallace stresses that journalists have never been mere passive observers. Using historical and contemporary examples—from lynching in the nineteenth century to transgender issues in the twenty-first—Wallace offers a definitive critique of “objectivity” as a catchall for accurate journalism. He calls for the dismissal of this damaging mythology in order to confront the realities of institutional power, racism, and other forms of oppression and exploitation in the news industry.

The View from Somewhere is a compelling rallying cry against journalist neutrality and for the validity of news told from distinctly subjective voices.

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Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution

Mahir Saul

Ohio University Press, 2010

African cinema in the 1960s originated mainly from Francophone countries. It resembled the art cinema of contemporary Europe and relied on support from the French film industry and the French state. Beginning in 1969 the biennial Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou (FESPACO), held in Burkina Faso, became the major showcase for these films. But since the early 1990s, a new phenomenon has come to dominate the African cinema world: mass-marketed films shot on less expensive video cameras. These “Nollywood” films, so named because many originate in southern Nigeria, are a thriving industry dominating the world of African cinema.

Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century is the first book to bring together a set of essays offering a comparison of these two main African cinema modes.

Contributors: Ralph A. Austen and Mahir Şaul, Jonathan Haynes, Onookome Okome, Birgit Meyer, Abdalla Uba Adamu, Matthias Krings, Vincent Bouchard, Laura Fair, Jane Bryce, Peter Rist, Stefan Sereda, Lindsey Green-Simms, and Cornelius Moore

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Vilém Flusser

An Introduction

Anke Finger

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) has long been known and celebrated in Europe and Brazil primarily as a media theorist. Only recently have other facets of his accomplishments come to light, clearly establishing Flusser as a key thinker.

An accessible and thorough introduction to Flusser’s thought, this book reveals his engagement with a wide array of disciplines, from communication studies, posthuman philosophy, media studies, and history to art and art history, migrant studies, anthropology, and film studies. The first to connect Flusser’s entire oeuvre, this volume shows how his works on media theory are just one part of a greater mosaic of writings that bring to the fore cultural and cognitive changes concerning all of us in the twenty-first century.

A theorist deeply influenced by his experiences as a privileged citizen of Prague, a Jew pursued by the Nazis, a European emigrant, a Brazilian immigrant, and a survivor keenly interested and invested in history and memory, Vilém Flusser was an outsider in a staunchly hierarchical and disciplined academic world.

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Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious, Volume 2

The Affective Hypothesis

Nidesh Lawtoo

Michigan State University Press, 2023

Representations of violence have subliminal contagious effects, but what kind of unconscious captures this imperceptible affective dynamic in the digital age? In volume two of a Janus-faced diagnostic of the cathartic and contagious effects of (new) media violence, Nidesh Lawtoo traces a genealogy of a long-neglected, embodied, relational, and highly mimetic unconscious that, well before the discovery of mirror neurons, posited mirroring reactions as a via regia to a phantom ego. Rather than being the product of a solipsistic discovery, the unconscious turns out to have haunted philosophers, psychologists, and artists for a long time. This book proposes a genealogy of untimely philosophical physicians that goes from Plato to Nietzsche, Bernheim to Féré, Freud to Bataille, Arendt to Girard, affect theory to the neurosciences. In their company, Lawtoo promotes the transdisciplinary field of mimetic studies by reevaluating the unconscious actions and reactions of homo mimeticus. As a new theory of mimesis emerges, Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious offers a searching diagnosis as to why the pathos of (new) media violence—from film to video games, police murders to the storming of the U.S Capitol—continues to cast a material shadow on the present and future.

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Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious

vol. 1, The Catharsis Hypothesis

Nidesh Lawtoo

Michigan State University Press, 2023

Representations of violence are often said to generate cathartic effects, but what does “catharsis” mean? And what theory of the unconscious made this concept so popular that it reaches from classical antiquity to the digital age? In Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious, Nidesh Lawtoo reframes current debates on (new) media violence by tracing the philosophical, aesthetic, and historical vicissitudes of the “catharsis hypothesis” from antiquity to modernity and into the present. Drawing on theorists of mimesis from Aristotle to Nietzsche, Bernays to Breuer, Freud to Girard to Morin, Lawtoo offers a genealogy of the relationship between violence and the unconscious with at least two aims: First, this study gives an account of the birth of the Oedipal unconscious—out of a “cathartic method.” Second, it provides new theoretical foundations to solve a riddle of (new) media violence that may no longer rest on Oedipal solutions. In the process, Lawtoo outlines a new theory of violence, mimesis, and the unconscious that does not have desire as a via regia, but rather, the untimely realization that all affects spread contagiously and thus mimetically.

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A Violent Peace

Media, Truth, and Power at the League of Nations

Carolyn N. Biltoft

University of Chicago Press, 2021

The newly born League of Nations confronted the post-WWI world—from growing stateless populations to the resurgence of right-wing movements—by aiming to create a transnational, cosmopolitan dialogue on justice. As part of these efforts, a veritable army of League personnel set out to shape “global public opinion,” in favor of the postwar liberal international order. Combining the tools of global intellectual history and cultural history, A Violent Peace reopens the archives of the League to reveal surprising links between the political use of modern information systems and the rise of mass violence in the interwar world. Historian Carolyn N. Biltoft shows how conflicts over truth and power that played out at the League of Nations offer broad insights into the nature of totalitarian regimes and their use of media flows to demonize a whole range of “others.”

An exploration of instability in information systems, the allure of fascism, and the contradictions at the heart of a global modernity, A Violent Peace paints a rich portrait of the emergence of the age of information—and all its attendant problems.

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The Virtual Life of Film

D. N. Rodowick

Harvard University Press, 2007

As almost (or, truly, virtually) every aspect of making and viewing movies is replaced by digital technologies, even the notion of “watching a film” is fast becoming an anachronism. With the likely disappearance of celluloid film stock as a medium, and the emergence of new media competing for an audience, what will happen to cinema—and to cinema studies? In the first of two books exploring this question, D. N. Rodowick considers the fate of film and its role in the aesthetics and culture of moviemaking and viewing in the twenty-first century.

Here Rodowick proposes and examines three different critical responses to the disappearance of film in relation to other time-based media, and to the study of contemporary visual culture. Film, he suggests, occupies a special place in the genealogy of the arts of the virtual: while film disappears, cinema persists—at least in the narrative forms imagined by Hollywood since 1915. Rodowick also observes that most so-called “new media” are fashioned upon a cinematic metaphor. His book helps us see how digital technologies are serving, like television and video before them, to perpetuate the cinematic as the mature audiovisual culture of the twentieth century—and, at the same time, how they are preparing the emergence of a new audiovisual culture whose broad outlines we are only just beginning to distinguish.

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The Virus Touch

Theorizing Epidemic Media

Bishnupriya Ghosh

Duke University Press, 2023

In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes “epidemic media” to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains her analytic gaze on these mediations as expressed in the collection and analysis of blood samples as a form of viral media; the geospatialization of data that track viral hosts like wild primates; and the use of multisensory images to trace fluctuations in viral mutations. Studying how epidemic media inscribe, store, and transmit multispecies relations attunes us to the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity like deforestation or illegal wildlife trading and the vulnerabilities accruing from diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect.

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Visions of Beirut

The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure

Hatim El-Hibri

Duke University Press, 2021

In Visions of Beirut Hatim El-Hibri explores how the creation and circulation of images have shaped the urban spaces and cultural imaginaries of Beirut. Drawing on fieldwork and texts ranging from maps, urban plans, and aerial photographs to live television and drone-camera footage, El-Hibri traces how the technologies and media infrastructure that visualize the city are used to consolidate or destabilize regimes of power. Throughout the twentieth century, colonial, economic, and military mapping projects helped produce and govern Beirut's spaces. In the 1990s, the imagery of its post-civil war downtown reconstruction cast Beirut as a site of financial investment in ways that obscured its ongoing crises. During and following the 2006 Israel/Hizbullah war, Hizbullah's use of live television broadcasts of fighting and protests along with its construction of a war memorial museum at a former secret military bunker demonstrate the tension between visualizing space and the practices of concealment. Outlining how Beirut's urban space and public life intertwine with images and infrastructure, El-Hibri interrogates how media embody and exacerbate the region's political fault lines.

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Visualising Facebook

A Comparative Perspective

Daniel Miller and Jolynna Sinanan

University College London, 2017

Since the growth of social media, human communication has become much more visual. This book presents a scholarly analysis of the images people post on a regular basis to Facebook. By including hundreds of examples, readers can see for themselves the differences between postings from a village north of London, and those from a small town in Trinidad. Why do women respond so differently to becoming a mother in England from the way they do in Trinidad? How are values such as carnival and suburbia expressed visually? Based on an examination of over 20,000 images, the authors argue that phenomena such as selfies and memes must be analysed in their local context. The book aims to highlight the importance of visual images today in patrolling and controlling the moral values of populations, and explores the changing role of photography from that of recording and representation, to that of communication, where an image not only documents an experience but also enhances it, making the moment itself more exciting.

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Visualizing Black Lives

Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media

Reighan Gillam

University of Illinois Press, 2022

A new generation of Afro-Brazilian media producers have emerged to challenge a mainstream that frequently excludes them. Reighan Gillam delves into the dynamic alternative media landscape developed by Afro-Brazilians in the twenty-first century. With works that confront racism and focus on Black characters, these artists and the visual media they create identify, challenge, or break with entrenched racist practices, ideologies, and structures. Gillam looks at a cross-section of media to show the ways Afro-Brazilians assert control over various means of representation in order to present a complex Black humanity. These images--so at odds with the mainstream--contribute to an anti-racist visual politics fighting to change how Brazilian media depicts Black people while highlighting the importance of media in the movement for Black inclusion.

An eye-opening union of analysis and fieldwork, Visualizing Black Lives examines the alternative and activist Black media and the people creating it in today's Brazil.

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Voice Over

The Making of Black Radio

William Barlow

Temple University Press, 1998

In Voice Over, a celebration and history, William Barlow explores the entire landscape of black radio from the early days - when the white public accepted the black-face buffoonery of "The Amos and Andy Show" and "Beulah" as a fair depiction of African American Life - to the rise of personality jocks and the contemporary scene of corporate buyouts and uncertain fate.

Barlow, whose voice has been heard on WPFW (Washington, D.C.) for many years, brings an insider's knowledge to this account of black radio as a predominantly local and still powerful medium. Many of the broadcasters he profiles -- Jack Cooper, Paul Robeson, Richard Durham, Cathy Hughes, Al Benson, Georgie Woods, Peggy Mitchell, Hal Jackson, Jocko Henderson, Mary Mason, Wesley South, Martha Jean "the Queen" Steinberg, to name a few -- became not only celebrities but also respected members of their communities. Atlanta's Jack "the Rapper" Gibson, for instance, tells how he literally shared his microphone with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to announce meetings and rally listeners around a key issue. By showing the extent to which so many black broadcasters achieved the status of trusted and influential community leaders, Barlow acknowledges that their grassroots activism was an indispensable and often overlooked part of the ongoing African American civil rights movement.

Voice Over also addresses black radio's broadly significant role in entertainment and shifting race relations. Until the rock and roll revolution, audiences had largely been segregated. The African American personality jocks who introduced white teens to rhythm and blues were a revelation; their wild style and personas and the music they played changed broadcasting while it enthralled a multiracial audience. Although the stations that introduced the enormously popular music were identified as black, virtually none was black-owned or managed. The broadcasters who distanced themselves from music industry perks and payoffs proposed an ambitious agenda for change. This little-known story sets the stage for how the proliferation of black-owned stations and networks occurred and for Barlow's assessment of the instability of today's black radio scene.

Written for a broad spectrum of readers -- from nostalgic fans of Jocko and Georgie Woods to loyal listeners of surviving stations and media watchers committed to diversity in broadcasting -- Voice Over tells the whole story of the making of black radio.

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