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From the Foreword by Geneva Overholser

What is it about really fine writers, how they delight, intrigue, compel us?

Style, you say. But style is not something you begin with. Rather, it's what you end up with, a result of far more fundamental traits. Traits such as an ear and an eye and a heart, traits that Madeleine Blais has honed superbly well. 

This is a book well named: The Heart Is an Instrument: Portraits in Journalism. The heart is surely first among Blais's gifts. Whether she is writing about the famous—playwright Tennessee Williams, novelist Mary Gordon—or about the least elevated among us—a teenage prostitute infected with the AIDS virus, a homeless schizophrenic—she brings to her subjects an incomparable empathy.

Yun Wen uses the Huawei story as a microcosm to understand China's evolving digital economy and the global rise of the nation's corporate power. Rejecting the idea of the transnational corporation as a static institution, she explains Huawei's formation and restructuring as a historical process replete with contradictions and complex consequences. She places Huawei within the international political economic framework to capture the dynamics of power structure and social relations underlying corporate China's globalization. As she explores the contradictions of Huawei's development, she also shows the ICT firm's complicated interactions with other political-economic forces.

Comprehensive and timely, The Huawei Model offers an essential analysis of China's dynamic development of digital economy and the global technology powerhouse at its core.

Tracing the cultural history of play—from Fluxus to SimCity

Games and gamified activities have become ubiquitous in many adults’ lives, and play is widely valued for fostering creativity, community, growth, and empathy. But how did we come to our current understanding of what it means to play? The Impossible Reversal charts the transformation of notions of playfulness beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, when a legion of artists, academics, and engineers developed new ways of theorizing, structuring, and designing ludic activity.

Through examples ranging from experimental Fluxus games to corporate role-playing exercises and from the Easy Bake Oven to Tetris, The Impossible Reversal presents four styles of playfulness characteristic of the “era of designed play”: the impossible reversal, which puts a player in a seemingly hopeless scenario they must upend with a tiny gesture; expending the secret, which involves silly rules that gain an obscure power and require players to embrace failure; simulated freedom, a satiric criticism of the ordinary world; and oblique repetition, a way of playing that stumbles toward unimaginable outcomes through simple, meaningless, and endlessly iterated acts.

A unique genealogical account of play as both concept and practice, The Impossible Reversal illuminates how playfulness became essential for understanding cultural, technical, and economic production in the United States.

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The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) has been a pioneer in the concept of an inter-American professional, independent, and self-sufficient pressure group that acts on its own initiative and subsists on its own resources. This study first traces the development of IAPA from the initial meeting in 1926 through the mid-1940’s, when a small group of dedicated Latin American and United States journalists began the fight to wrest the IAPA from the control of government lackeys and Communist agents. Previously scarce accounts of the early annual meetings, often noisy and disorganized and sometimes violent, give the reader an insight into the problems and animosities faced by the democratically oriented members.

Mary A. Gardner then describes a reorganization in 1950, after which IAPA actively fought for the freedom of newspaper workers tyrannized by Latin American dictators, such as Argentina’s Perón, Colombia’s Rojas Pinilla, Cuba’s Batista, and the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo. Even while IAPA was fighting for freedom of the press it began several services for its member newspapers: It set up a circulation auditing service, created a scholarship fund, undertook a newsprint study, and established a technical center. It also began the administration of the Mergenthaler Awards—prizes awarded yearly to outstanding Latin American journalists.

Gardner also analyzes the merits of IAPA, basing her conclusions on data obtained from her own observations, from letters written by others long associated with operations of the organization, and from interviews with Latin American and North American journalists. She concludes that IAPA apparently surmounted the barriers of nationalism, of cultural and political differences, and of personal prejudices, thus succeeding in its attempt to unite its members in the fight for freedom of the press and for the propagation of democracy in the hemisphere.

An important new approach to the study of laboratories, presenting a practical method for understanding labs in all walks of life

From the “Big Science” of Bell Laboratories to the esoteric world of séance chambers to university media labs to neighborhood makerspaces, places we call “labs” are everywhere—but how exactly do we account for the wide variety of ways that they produce knowledge? More than imitations of science and engineering labs, many contemporary labs are hybrid forms that require a new methodological and theoretical toolkit to describe. The Lab Book investigates these vital, creative spaces, presenting readers with the concept of the “hybrid lab” and offering an extended—and rare—critical investigation of how labs have proliferated throughout culture.

Organized by interpretive categories such as space, infrastructure, and imaginaries, The Lab Book uses both historical and contemporary examples to show how laboratories have become fundamentally connected to changes in the contemporary university. Its wide reach includes institutions like the MIT Media Lab, the Tuskegee Institute’s Jesup Wagon, ACTLab, and the Media Archaeological Fundus. The authors cover topics such as the evolution and delineation of lab-based communities, how labs’ tools and technologies contribute to defining their space, and a glossary of key hybrid lab techniques.

Providing rich historical breadth and depth, The Lab Book brings into focus a critical, but often misunderstood, aspect of the contemporary arts and humanities. 

Electroshock. Hysterectomy. Lobotomy. These are only three of the many “cures” to which lesbians have been subjected in this century. How does a society develop such a profound aversion to a particular minority? In what ways do images in the popular media perpetuate cultural stereotypes about lesbians, and to what extent have lesbians been able to subvert and revise those images? This book addresses these and other questions by examining how lesbianism has been represented in American popular culture in the twentieth century and how conflicting ideologies have shaped lesbian experiences and identity.

In the first section, “Inventing the Lesbian,” Sherrie A. Inness explores depictions of lesbians in popular texts aimed primarily at heterosexual consumers. She moves from novels of the 1920s to books about life at women's colleges and boarding schools, to such contemporary women's magazines as Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Vogue.

In the next section, “Forms of Resistance,” Inness probes the ways in which lesbians have refashioned texts intended for a heterosexual audience or created their own narratives. One chapter shows how lesbian readers have reinterpreted the Nancy Drew mysteries, looking at them from a distinctly “queer” perspective. Another chapter addresses the changing portrayal of lesbians in children's books over the past two decades.

The last section, “Writing in the Margins,” scrutinizes the extent to which lesbians, themselves a marginalized group, have created a society that relegates some of its own members to the outskirts. Topics include the geographic politics of lesbianism, the complex issue of "passing," and the meaning of butch identity in twentieth-century lesbian culture.

A poetics for reading the everyday objects that populate a hard drive

Bespoke online archives like PennSound and Eclipse host an astounding array of “old media” artifacts, posing a handcrafted counterpoint to the immense databases aggregated by digital titans like Google and Facebook. In The Little Database, Daniel Scott Snelson argues for the significance of these comparatively “small” collections, exploring how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host and how they might help us better understand our own private collections in turn.

Examining curated collections such as Textz, UbuWeb, and the Electronic Poetry Center, Snelson explores media-specific works by poets and artists, including William Carlos Williams, Tracie Morris, bill bissett, Nam June Paik, and Vicki Bennett. He develops creative tools and contingent methods for reading cultural data, whether found on the internet or in our own collections of TXT, JPG, MP3, and MOV artifacts, presenting case studies to show how these objects have come to find revised meaning in their digital contexts. Along the way, experimental poetic interludes give readers practical entry points into the creative practice of producing new meanings in any given little database.

Inventive and interdisciplinary, The Little Database grapples with the digitized afterlives of cultural objects, showing how the past is continually reconfigured to shape the present. It invites readers to find playful and personal means for unpacking their own data collections, in the process discovering idiosyncratic ways to explore and connect with digital archives.

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A sweeping history of our relationship with weather in art, media, philosophy, religion, and science—and how the climate continually defies demystification. 

We moderns tend to take the weather for granted.  We know it through hourly timetables and radar maps and otherwise make it the subject of predictable and safe conversation. But weather is not safe or predictable and never has been. People have long used all their ingenuity to imagine and portray its shifty ways.  As John Durham Peters argues, a closer look at the history of these efforts, from painting and poetry to cartography and close observation, has the potential to disclose something important about what it means to live in the world. 

In The Meaning of Weather, John Durham Peters shows how the long history of understanding the weather has seen dreamers and data-crunchers alike craft remarkable visions of the world around us. From Babylonian astronomy to the Event Horizon Telescope, from illuminated manuscripts to television, and more, Peters explores the kaleidoscopic ways people have sought to understand, tame, or manage the weather—and how the climate resists being bridled. In this magisterial telling, Peters reimagines Western culture as a continuing struggle to know ourselves and each other through an ever-changing environment.

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.

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.

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.

Justin Bieber launched his music career on YouTube in 2007, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” exploded on TikTok in 2019, and Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” soared to the top of the Billboard charts just two weeks after its YouTube debut in 2023. These viral successes inspire countless artists to upload music online, fueled by the promise that technology can democratize opportunity, but does this promise hold true?

The Myth of Opportunity: Music, Labor, and Platforms in the Twenty-First Century critically examines the myth of technology as a great equalizer in the music industry. While platforms like Spotify claim to empower artists, the reality is that rewards remain highly unequal. Through macroeconomic analysis and time series methodology, this book investigates how streaming services have reshaped opportunity from a labor perspective across professions, industries, and regions, offering a comprehensive, empirical view on the true impact of digital platforms on cultural production with a focus on music.

Uncovering a vast maze of realities in the media theories of Marshall McLuhan

The term “global village”—coined in the 1960s by Marshall McLuhan—has persisted into the twenty-first century as a key trope of techno-humanitarian discourse, casting economic and technical transformations in a utopian light. Against that tendency, this book excavates the violent history, originating with techniques of colonial rule in Africa, that gave rise to the concept of the global village. To some extent, we are all global villagers, but given the imbalances of semiotic power, some belong more thoroughly than others. Reassessing McLuhan’s media theories in light of their entanglement with colonial and neocolonial techniques, Nolan implicates various arch-paradigms of power (including “terra-power”) in the larger prerogative of managing human populations.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Unlocking a vital understanding of how literary studies and media studies overlap and are bound together

A synthetic history of new media reception in modern and contemporary Japan, The New Real positions mimesis at the heart of the media concept. Considering both mimicry and representation as the core functions of mediation and remediation, Jonathan E. Abel offers a new model for media studies while explaining the deep and ongoing imbrication of Japan in the history of new media.

From stereoscopy in the late nineteenth century to emoji at the dawn of the twenty-first, Abel presents a pioneering history of new media reception in Japan across the analog and digital divide. He argues that there are two realities created by new media: one marketed to us through advertising that proclaims better, faster, and higher-resolution connections to the real; and the other experienced by users whose daily lives and behaviors are subtly transformed by the presence and penetration of the content carried through new media. Intervening in contemporary conversations about virtuality, copyright, copycat violence, and social media, each chapter unfolds with a focus on a single medium or technology, including 3D photographs, the phonograph, television, videogames, and emoji.

By highlighting the tendency of the mediated to copy the world and the world to copy the mediated, The New Real provides a new path for analysis of media, culture, and their function in the world.