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This edited collection explores the notion of agency by tracing the role and activities of consumers from the pre-internet age into the possible future. Using an overview of the historical creation of consumer identity, Consumer Identities demonstrates that active consumption is not merely a product of the digital age; it has always been a means by which a person can develop identity. Grounded in the acknowledgment that identity is a constructed and contested space, the authors analyze emerging dynamics in contemporary consumerism, ongoing tensions of structure and agency in consumer identities, and the ways in which identity construction could be influenced in the future. By exploring consumer identity through examples in pop culture, the authors have created a scholarly work that will appeal to industry professionals as well as academics.

Digital culture is often characterized as radically breaking with past technologies, practices, and ideologies rather than as reflecting or incorporating them. Memory Bytes seeks to counter such ahistoricism, arguing for the need to understand digital culture—and its social, political, and ethical ramifications—in historical and philosophical context. Looking at a broad range of technologies, including photography, print and digital media, heat engines, stereographs, and medical imaging, the contributors present a number of different perspectives from which to reflect on the nature of media change. While foregrounding the challenges of drawing comparisons across varied media and eras, Memory Bytes explores how technologies have been integrated into society at different moments in time.

These essays from scholars in the social sciences and humanities cover topics related to science and medicine, politics and war, mass communication, philosophy, film, photography, and art. Whether describing how the cultural and legal conflicts over player piano rolls prefigured controversies over the intellectual property status of digital technologies such as mp3 files; comparing the experiences of watching QuickTime movies to Joseph Cornell’s “boxed relic” sculptures of the 1930s and 1940s; or calling for a critical history of electricity from the Enlightenment to the present, Memory Bytes investigates the interplay of technology and culture. It relates the Information Age to larger and older political and cultural phenomena, analyzes how sensory effects have been technologically produced over time, considers how human subjectivity has been shaped by machines, and emphasizes the dependence of particular technologies on the material circumstances within which they were developed and used.

Contributors. Judith Babbitts, Scott Curtis, Ronald E. Day, David Depew, Abraham Geil, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, Lisa Gitelman, N. Katherine Hayles, John Durham Peters, Lauren Rabinovitz, Laura Rigal, Vivian Sobchack, Thomas Swiss

To err is human; to err in digital culture is design. In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, Peter Krapp identifies creative reservoirs of computer-mediated interaction. Throughout new media cultures, he traces a resistance to the heritage of motion studies, ergonomics, and efficiency; in doing so, he shows how creativity is stirred within the networks of digital culture.

Noise Channels offers a fresh look at hypertext and tactical media, tunes into laptop music, and situates the emergent forms of computer gaming and machinima in media history. Krapp analyzes text, image, sound, virtual spaces, and gestures in noisy channels of computer-mediated communication that seek to embrace—rather than overcome—the limitations and misfires of computing. Equally at home with online literature, the visual tactics of hacktivism, the recuperation of glitches in sound art, electronica, and videogames, or machinima as an emerging media practice, he explores distinctions between noise and information, and how games pivot on errors at the human–computer interface.

Grounding the digital humanities in the conditions of possibility of computing culture, Krapp puts forth his insight on the critical role of information in the creative process.

Examines Taylor Swift as a nexus of music, media, fandom, and branding, revealing how her enterprise reflects and reshapes contemporary culture.

Taylor Swift as Storyteller examines one of the most influential cultural figures of the twenty-first century as both artist and “star text,” arguing that Swift’s global impact is shaped through the dynamic interplay of music, media, fandom, and branding. Bringing together literary scholars, ethnographers, and musicologists, this collection positions Swift as not just a pop figure but a transmedial construct.

Contributors explore how Swift’s carefully curated personae—from girl-next-door to feminist icon to “tortured poet”—generate powerful affective connections with audiences while also functioning as strategic marketing tools. At the same time, contributors retheorize authorship and control in the digital age. By foregrounding the roles of management, branding, and platform circulation, and by interrogating the participatory roles of Swifties as cocreators of meaning, Taylor Swift as Storyteller complicates the idea of singular authorship. Attending to questions of feminism, authorship, nostalgia, and literary adaptation, this collection ultimately reveals how Swift’s enterprise both reflects and reshapes contemporary media culture, illuminating the complex relationship between narrative, identity, and power in the digital age.

Contributors:
Natalie Abbott, Alexander Carpenter, Zixiao Chen, Katie E. Cline, Jennifer Duggan, Rachel M. Friars, Andrea LeMahieu Glaws, Wendy J. Glenn, Alison Halsall, Roxanne Harde, Juliette Holder, Erika Kvistad, Zhimou Li, Sarah E. Maier, Catherine McCarthy, Elly McCausland, Laura Carman McClintock, Adrianna Mirabal, Linh S. Nguy?n, Hazel O’Brien, Anah-Jayne Samuelson, L. M. Schmidt, Katlin Marisol Sweeney-Romero

Most readers think of a written work as producing its meaning through the words it contains. But what is the significance of the detailed and beautiful illuminations on a medieval manuscript? Of the deliberately chosen typefaces in a book of poems by Yeats? Of the design and layout of text in an electronic format? How does the material form of a work shape its understanding in a particular historical moment, in a particular culture?
The material features of texts as physical artifacts--their "bibliographic codes" --have over the last decade excited increasing interest in a variety of disciplines. The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture gathers essays by an extraordinarily distinguished group of scholars to offer the most comprehensive examination of these issues yet, drawing on examples from literature, history, the fine arts, and philosophy.
Fittingly, the volume contains over two dozen illustrations that display the iconic features of the works analyzed--from Alfred the Great's Boethius through medieval manuscripts to the philosophy of C. S. Peirce and the dustjackets on works by F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Styron.
The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture will be groundbreaking reading for scholars in a wide range of fields.
George Bornstein is C. A. Patrides Professor of English, University of Michigan. Theresa Tinkle is Associate Professor of English, University of Michigan.