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An analysis of the interrelationship between media forms, format, and meaning.

Media Materialities brings together a team of scholars to analyze the increasingly complex relationships between media forms and formats, materiality, and meaning. Deploying a number of different qualitative methodologies, the contributors address three overarching concepts: form, format, and ephemeral meaning. They investigate a range of media artifacts, such as 8mm film, board game maps, videogames, cassette tapes, transistor radios, and Twitter. Their goal is to create spaces for conversation and debate about the implications that this plurality of material meanings might have for the study of media, culture, and society.
 

The first comprehensive study of how digital media is regulated across Africa's diverse political and legal landscapes.

As one of the few books focused exclusively on the governance of new media across the African continent, Regulating Digital Media in Africa offers a timely and critical engagement with the legal and policy frameworks shaping broadcasting, social media, and the broader digital ecosystem. Drawing on in-depth case studies from African scholars who cover a wide range of African countries and political systems and interviews with professionals involved in shaping or contesting regulatory outcomes, the book reveals key trends, contradictions, and policy dilemmas in new media regulation. It highlights how governments are responding to challenges such as internet shutdowns, online harms, data governance, and digital legislation.

This book provides a strong conceptual and empirical foundation for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners interested in digital governance in Africa. With its Global South perspective, it offers valuable contributions to broader debates on media regulation, sovereignty, and internet governance.
 

The first book of its kind to investigate Britain’s trade in illicit pornographic 8mm film. 

Prior to 2000, it was a criminal offense to sell hardcore pornography in Britain. Despite this, there was a thriving alternative economy producing and distributing such material “under the counter” of Soho’s bookshops and via mail-order. British entrepreneurs circumvented obscenity laws to satisfy the demand for uncensored adult films and profit from their enterprise, with corrupt members of the Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publications Squad permitting them to trade.

By the late 1960s, Britain had developed an international reputation for producing “rollers,” short hardcore films distributed on 8mm, which were smuggled out of Britain for sale in Western Europe. Following an exposé by Britain’s tabloid press, a crackdown on police corruption, and several high-profile obscenity trials, the trade was all but decimated, with pornography smuggled in from Europe dominating the market.

Drawing on extensive archival research, including the use of legal records, police files, media reportage, and interviews with those who were involved in the business, Under the Counter tells the story of Britain’s trade in 8mm hardcore pornographic films and its regulation.