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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.

It is often assumed that natural philosophy was the forerunner of early modern natural sciences. But where did these sciences’ systematic observation and experimentation get their starts? In Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe, the laboratories, workshops, and marketplaces emerge as arenas where hands-on experience united with higher learning. In an age when chemistry, mineralogy, geology, and botany intersected with mining, metallurgy, pharmacy, and gardening, materials were objects that crossed disciplines.

Here, the contributors tell the stories of metals, clay, gunpowder, pigments, and foods, and thereby demonstrate the innovative practices of technical experts, the development of the consumer market, and the formation of the observational and experimental sciences in the early modern period. Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe showcases a broad variety of forms of knowledge, from ineffable bodily skills and technical competence to articulated know-how and connoisseurship, from methods of measuring, data gathering, and classification to analytical and theoretical knowledge. By exploring the hybrid expertise involved in the making, consumption, and promotion of various materials, and the fluid boundaries they traversed, the book offers an original perspective on important issues in the history of science, medicine, and technology.

Measuring innovation is a challenging task, both for researchers and for national statisticians, and it is increasingly important in light of the ongoing digital revolution. National accounts and many other economic statistics were designed before the emergence of the digital economy and the growth in importance of intangible capital. They do not yet fully capture the wide range of innovative activity that is observed in modern economies. This volume examines how to measure innovation, track its effects on economic activity and on prices, and understand how it has changed the structure of production processes, labor markets, and organizational form and operation in business. The contributors explore new approaches to and data sources for measurement, such as collecting data for a particular innovation as opposed to a firm and using trademarks for tracking innovation. They also consider the connections between university-based R&D and business start-ups and the potential impacts of innovation on income distribution. The research suggests strategies for expanding current measurement frameworks to better capture innovative activity, including developing more detailed tracking of global value chains to identify innovation across time and space and expanding the measurement of innovation’s impacts on GDP in fields such as consumer content delivery and cloud computing. 

Exploring how we make, distribute, and consume today’s media systems

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

Media Rurality investigates the centrality of rural places and people within the media systems and technologies that shape daily life in and across rural and urban settings alike. From the boglands of Ireland to data centers in the Oregon countryside to the homemade media systems of rural Tanzania, the contributors to this volume show how rural territories are highly mediated, technologized spaces profoundly enmeshed with global capitalism and colonialism. Approaching the study of rurality through a materialist lens that foregrounds infrastructure, this collection shows how rural spaces often bear the environmental brunt of capitalist development while being relegated to the economic and cultural periphery.

Contributors. Christopher Ali, Patrick Bresnihan, Patrick Brodie, Darin Barney, Jenna Burrell, Jordan B. Kinder, Burç Köstem, Cindy Lin, Emily Ng, Lisa Parks, Anne Pasek, Esther Peeren, Nicole Starosielski, Ishita Tiwary, Hunter Vaughan, Ayesha Vemuri, Megan Wiessner, Assatu Wisseh

"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

The contributors to this volume seek further understanding of the microfoundations of economic growth. It focuses on three subjects that interested the great Austrian and Harvard economist, Joseph A. Schumpeter: innovation, technological change, and economic growth. The first part of the volume treats institutions, markets, and entrepreneurs, without which analysis of the firm makes little or no sense. The second part focuses on the firm as innovator, placing heavy emphasis on the role of knowledge formation. The subjects of innovation and knowledge formation are approached from three perspectives: theoretical; industry (case) studies; and empirical (cross section and panel data) analysis. In the third part of the book the action moves from the firm to the "macro" or economy-wide level. The volume's unique feature is combining institutions, the innovative behavior of firms, and an intuitively dynamic, macroeconomic analysis, all from a Schumpeterian perspective. It is argued that the study of micro-institutions such as firms and the evolving nature of markets are necessary ingredients to understanding macro-oriented phenomena such as economic growth. It is in this sense, then, that the book is concerned with microfoundations. Contributors are Daniele Archibugi, Spyros Arvanitis, David B. Audretsch, John R. Baldwin, Gerard Ballot, Pontus Braunerhjelm, Dagobert L. Brito, Uwe Cantner, Bo Carlsson, Robert W. Clower, Richard Day, Rinaldo Evangelista, Jan Glete, Horst Hanusch, Heinz Hollenstein, Michael D. Intrilgator, George Johnson, Joanne Johnson, Aija Leiponen, Staffan Laestadius, Richard N. Langlois, Frank M. Machovec, Maureen McKelvey, Valentina Meiciani, Douglass C. North, Giulio Perani, Andreas Pyka, Fabio Rapiti, Roberto Simonetti, Frank Stafford, Paula E. Stephan, Erol Taymaz, Clas Wihlborg, Erica R. Worth, and S. Y. Wu. Gunnar K. Eliasson is Professor of Industrial Economics, Royal Technical Institute (KTH), Stockholm. Christopher Green is Professor of Economics, McGill University. Charles R. McCann, Jr., is Research Associate, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh.

Two of the fastest growing sectors of communications today are mobile and Internet, both of which have had a profound effect on people's lives. The convergence between these two sectors not only presents great opportunities for the future of 'unplugged' telecommunications but also great challenges in understanding the relative position of different technologies in this future.

Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is a much-talked about term in the transportation industry and in transport policy. The goal of MaaS is a shift away from personally-owned modes of transportation and towards mobility solutions that are consumed as a service. Such solutions are typically enabled by digital technologies and platforms. MaaS systems might combine transportation services from public and private transportation providers, like train and carsharing services, through a unified portal to create and manage journeys, which users can pay for with a single account. MaaS offers travellers mobility solutions based on their travel needs.