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A daily battle for rights and freedoms in cyberspace is being waged in Asia. At the epicenter of this contest is China—home to the world’s largest Internet population and what is perhaps the world’s most advanced Internet censorship and surveillance regime in cyberspace. Resistance to China’s Internet controls comes from both grassroots activists and corporate giants such as Google. Meanwhile, similar struggles play out across the rest of the region, from India and Singapore to Thailand and Burma, although each national dynamic is unique. This book is the third volume from the OpenNet Initiative (a collaborative partnership of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and the SecDev Group in Ottawa), and it examines the interplay of national security, social and ethnic identity, and resistance in Asian cyberspace, offering accounts of national struggles against Internet controls as well as updated country reports by ONI researchers. The contributors examine such topics as Internet censorship in Thailand, the Malaysian blogosphere, surveillance and censorship around gender and sexuality in Malaysia, Internet governance in China, corporate social responsibility and freedom of expression in South Korea and India, cyber attacks on independent Burmese media, and distributed-denial-of-service attacks and other digital control measures across Asia.

This book traces the evolution of the archive across the centuries by looking at primitive, Medieval, Renaissance, Victorian and contemporary archives. Crucially, the book evidences the fluidity and potential inter-changeability between libraries, archives and museums. A number of case studies offer an insight into the operation of a variety of different types of archives, including cabinets of curiosity, archival artforms, architectures, performances, road-shows, time capsules, social media documentation practices, databases, and a variety of museological web-based heritage platforms. The archive is shown to play a crucial role in how individuals and social groups administer themselves through and within a burgeoning social memory apparatus. This is why at the heart of every industrial revolution thus far, the archive continues to contribute to the way we store, preserve and generate knowledge through an accumulation of documents, artifacts, objects, as well as ephemera and even debris. The archive has always been strategic for different types of economies, including the digital economy and the internet of things. Shown here to increasingly affect to the way we map, produce, and share knowledge, the apparatus of the archive, which allows us to continuously renew who we are in relation to the past, so that new futures may become possible, now effectively pervades almost every aspect of our lives.

Bioethical dilemmas, including those over genetic screening, compulsory vaccination, and abortion, have been the subject of ongoing debates in the media, and among the public, professionals, and academic communities. But the paramount bioethical issue in an age of digital technology and new media is the transformation of the very notion of life. This book examines many of the ethical challenges that technology poses to the allegedly sacrosanct idea of the human. In doing so, it goes beyond the traditional understanding of bioethics as a matter for moral philosophy and medicine to propose an “ethics of life” rooted in the relationship between the human and the non-human (both animals and machines) that new technology prompts us to develop. The author describes three cases of “bioethics in action,” through which the concepts of “the human,” “animal,” and “life” are being redefined: the reconfiguration of bodily identity by plastic surgery in a TV makeover show; the reduction of the body to two-dimensional genetic code; and the use of biological material in such examples of “bioart” as Eduardo Kac’s infamous fluorescent green bunny. The book addresses ethics from the interdisciplinary perspective of media and cultural studies, drawing on the writings of thinkers from Agamben and Foucault to Haraway and Hayles. Taking theoretical inspiration in particular from the philosophy of alterity as developed by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Bernard Stiegler, the author makes the case for a new non-systemic, non-hierarchical bioethics that encompasses the kinship of humans, animals, and machines.

Digital production tools and online networks have dramatically increased the general visibility, accessibility, and diversity of pornography, which can be accessed for free, anonymously, and in a seemingly endless range of niches, styles, and formats. This book moves beyond the usual debates over the legal, political, and moral aspects of pornography to address online pornography in a media historical framework, investigating its modalities, its affect, and its visceral and disturbing qualities. Countering theorizations of pornography as emotionless, affectless, detached, and cold, it addresses experiences of pornography, largely through the notion of affect as gut reactions, intensities of experience, bodily sensations, resonances, and ambiguous feelings. The author links these investigations to considerations of methodology (ways of theorizing and analyzing online pornography and affect), questions of materiality (bodies, technologies, and inscriptions), and the evolution of online pornography. She discusses the development of online pornography, focusing on the figure of the pornography consumer, and considers user-generated content and amateur pornography. The author maps out the modality of online pornography as hyperbolic, excessive, stylized, and repetitive, arguing that literal readings of the genre misunderstand its dynamics and appeal. She also analyzes viral videos and extreme and shock pornography, arguing for the centrality of disgust and shame in the affective dynamics of pornography. The book’s analysis makes clear the crucial role of media technologies—digital production tools and networked communications in particular—in the forms that pornography takes, the resonances it stirs, and the experiences it makes possible.

This book draws on live performance practice, digital technologies, and the philosophical approach of phenomenology. The human body is placed at the center of explorations of interactive interfaces, responsive systems, and affective computing. The author asks what can be discovered as we become closer to our computers—as they become extensions of our ways of thinking, moving, and touching. Performance can act as a catalyst for understanding wider social and cultural uses of digital technology. Taking this one step further, performative acts of sharing the body through our digital devices foster a collaborative construction of new physical states, levels of conscious awareness, and even ethics. We reencounter ourselves and others through our interactive computer systems. What we need now are conceptual and methodological frameworks to reflect this. The book offers a reworking of the phenomenology of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This method, based on a respect for lived experience, begins by listening to the senses and noting insights that arrive in the midst of dance, or quite simply in the midst of life. The combination of performance and phenomenology yields entwinements between experience and reflection that shed light on, problematize, or restructure scholarly approaches to human bodies using digital technologies. After outlining her approach and methodology and clarifying the key concepts of performance, technologies, and virtuality, the author applies the phenomenological method to the experience of designing and performing in a range of computational systems: telematics, motion capture, responsive architectures, and wearable computing.

If the gaze can be understood to mark the disjuncture between how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen by others, the cosmetic gaze—in this book’s formulation—is one through which the act of looking at our bodies and the bodies of others is already informed by the techniques, expectations, and strategies (often surgical) of bodily modification. It is, the author says, also a moralizing gaze, a way of looking at bodies as awaiting both physical and spiritual improvement. The book charts this synthesis of outer and inner transformation. It shows how the cosmetic gaze underlies the “rebirth” celebrated in today’s makeover culture and how it builds upon a body concept which has collapsed into its mediality. In today’s beauty discourse—on reality TV and websites that collect “bad plastic surgery”—we yearn to experience a bettered self which has been reborn from its own flesh and is now itself, like a digitally remastered character in a classic Hollywood movie, immortal. The author traces the cosmetic gaze from eighteenth-century ideas about physiognomy through television makeover shows and facial-recognition software to cinema—which, like our other screens, never ceases to show us our bodies as they could be, drawing life from the very cosmetic gaze it transmits.

The past ten years have brought significant growth in access to Web technology and in the educational possibilities of social media. These changes challenge previous conceptualizations of education and the classroom, and pose practical questions for learners, teachers, and administrators. Today, the unique capabilities of social media are influencing learning and teaching in ways previously unseen. Social media is transforming sectors outside education by changing patterns in personal, commercial, and cultural interaction. These changes offer a window into the future(s) of education, with new means of knowledge production and reception, and new roles for learners and teachers. Surveying the uses to which social media has been applied in these early years, we see a need to re-envision education for the coming decades. To date, no book has systematically and accessibly examined how the cultural and technological shift of social media is influencing educational practices. With this book, we aim to fill that gap. This book critically explores the future of education and online social media, convening leading scholars from the fields of education, law, communications, and cultural studies. We believe that this interdisciplinary edited volume will appeal to a broad audience of scholars, practitioners, and policy makers who seek to understand the opportunities for learning and education that exist at the intersection of social media and education. The book will examine educational institutions, access and participation, new literacies and competencies, cultural reproduction, international accreditation, intellectual property, privacy and protection, new business models, and technical architectures for digital education.

This book explores technology’s influence on artistic performance practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The author shows that technologies, from the mechanical to the computational—from a “ballet of objects and lights” staged by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1917 to contemporary, technologically enabled “responsive environments”—have been entangled with performance across a wide range of disciplines. The author examines the rich and extensive history of performance experimentation in theatre, music, dance, the visual and media arts, architecture, and other fields; explores the political, social, and economic context for the adoption of technological practices in art; and shows that these practices have a set of common histories despite their disciplinary borders. Each chapter in the book focuses on a different form: theaterscenography, architecture, video and image making, music and sound composition, body-based arts, mechanical and robotic art, and interactive environments constructed for research, festivals, and participatory urban spaces. The author shows that the survey and analysis of performance traditions have much to teach other emerging practices—in particular in the burgeoning fields of new media. Students of digital art need to master not only electronics and code but also dramaturgy, lighting, sound, and scenography.

Video games have a bad reputation in the mainstream media. They are blamed for encouraging social isolation, promoting violence, and creating tensions between parents and children. In this book, Sinem Siyahhan and Elisabeth Gee offer another view. They show that video games can be a tool for connection, not isolation, creating opportunities for families to communicate and learn together. Siyahhan and Gee offer examples of how video games, like smartphones, Skype, and social media, help families stay connected. Further, they describe how families express their feelings and share their experiences and understanding of the world through playing video games like Sims, Civilization, and Minecraft. When designed intentionally to support families, video games can also create conversations around such real-world issues and sensitive topics as bullying and peer pressure. Siyahhan and Gee draw on a decade of research to look at how learning and teaching take place when families play video games together. With video games, they argue, the parents are not necessarily the teachers and experts; all family members can be both teachers and learners. They suggest video games can help families form, develop, and sustain their learning culture as well as develop skills that are valued in the twenty-first century workplace. Finally, Siyahhan and Gee share recommendations for educators and game designers who are interested in supporting intergenerational play around video games.

A guide to the nature, purpose, and place of public service television within a multi-platform, multichannel ecology. Television is on the verge of both decline and rebirth. Vast technological change has brought about financial uncertainty as well as new creative possibilities for producers, distributors, and viewers. This book examines not only the unexpected resilience of TV as a cultural pastime and aesthetic practice but also the prospects for public service television in a digital, multichannel ecology. The proliferation of platforms from Amazon and Netflix to YouTube and the vlogosphere means intense competition for audiences traditionally dominated by legacy broadcasters. Public service broadcasters — whether the BBC, the German ARD, or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — are particularly vulnerable to this volatility. Born in the more stable political and cultural conditions of the twentieth century, they face a range of pressures on their revenue, their remits, and indeed their very futures. This book reflects on the issues raised in Lord Puttnam's 2016 Public Service TV Inquiry Report. With resonance for students, professionals, and consumers with a stake in British media, it serves both as a historical record and as a look at the future of television in an on-demand age.