Media Theorists Research Articles

The role of space and place in social media communication: two case studies of policy perspectives

The study of how space and place intersect with social policy is still nascent but developing rapidly. As two exemplars of the potential that such research offers, the objective of this review is to integrate the research collected during recent studies of fracking and the death penalty. The primary disciplinary value of this review is to demonstrate the spatial value of communication and social media studies. This study adopts a communication-based theoretical framework as a lens to guide methodological choices in analyzing public perceptions. The social media application from Twitter is used as the engine to capture opinions of social media users engaging public controversies. This review locates connections in the literature between geographers/spatial scientists and communication media theorists.

NEW MEDIA AND “AFFECTIVITY”: CASES FROM BELARUS

Early scholars of new media saw internet as new free self-productive media which can transfers its own form on society at large. But with emerging of some kind of internet-monopolists (Google, Facebook etc.) such techno-optimistic point of view clashes with works of new generation of new media theorists. This article is suggesting that such properties of new media as interactivity and common creation of content in contemporary political condition of populist turn and economical condition of monopolism lead to producing of «affectiveness» which endangers democracy. The last one understood as possibility of group of people to solve political questions as independent and rational persons. Article sees bad condition of monopolism mostly not as lack of competition in new media sphere, but as contemporary view on new media sees last as usual capitalist enterprises which can save their own «commercial secrets». Usual mechanism of Page Rank algorithm on Google or news feed on Facebook are such secrets which are not free to discuss in society. «Affectiveness» in such case understood as possibility of users of new media take and distribute lots of unverified information through «closed» mechanism of new media. This article provides some specific cases of «affectivity» in Belarusian internet space – analysis of internet-communities of «national-anarchists», internet-struggle between supporters of BPR and BSSR for claiming these states as first national Belarusian state and case of virtual state «Viejsnoryja». All these cases connected with painful issues of Belarusian society (such as lack of democratic institutions or lack of public discussion about national history) and illustrates how these problematic questions are «affect» users by the internet-mechanism to collective dreaming (in best case) or mutual hostility (in worst case) instead of rational discussion about these issues.

Being more human in the digital world- technology to touch all, serve all

Canadian media theorist, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “this world is a global village”. The whole world has indeed shrunk through technological advancements and intercontinental technology transfers. However, the nations are still bound together only through humanness amidst diversity and not merely through technological exchanges. We found that most of the prevailing technologies come with an inherent challenge that is tradeoff between cost and affordability. For example, a recent study by World Bank and World Health Organization on expenditure towards healthcare, education and other essentials shows an alarmingly increasing rate on expenditure thereby making affordability to get access to such benefits a critical problem to solve in general. These are also the fields where maximum technological advancements are happening today. Our paper focuses predominantly on this tradeoff especially those challenges faced by senior citizens, super senior citizens, economically marginalized sect of people and differently abled. Our work also looks at the means on how technologies could assist them to live independently and get access to some of the emerging technologies without actually knowing the intricacies. Our purpose is also to bring technology that is affordable, implementable at lower cost and that delivers higher efficiency with maximized reach in society. We hence chose this study of adoption of emerging and open source technologies such as semantics and their indispensable role in serving the society.

Has Marshall Mcluhan’s media theory influenced the formation of the Catholic Church’s approach to public communication?

The article analyses the question of whether the media conception of one of the most prominent media theorists, Marshall McLuhan, has influenced the formation of the Catholic Church’s concept of communication tools. The conclusion of the study is negative: the position of the Church has developed independently from the theoretical discoveries of the Canadian professor.

Body Conjunction = Wavering Between Actual and Virtual Spaces

In the present digital age, the body tends to extend beyond it being flesh, it can be extended, it is a body without organs, and it might belong to more than your own-self. The “Body” as a living entity with its embedded sensory system, not only embodies who we are but also lets us understand and explore the sensitive, unpredictable but fascinating world. The body is an information receiver as well as information reactor. Through years of medical experiments and research on the body, medical devices and instruments are able to allow us to look into the deepest and the most mysterious spots in the human body. For instance, if seen through an HD monitor, while being probed by an endoscope, the body appears as an immersive and infinite landscape. By observing the smoothness and the folds of the surfaces encountered within the body, it is quite simple to project your individual self into this body-scape for a while to imagine and experience this immersive organic space. Various potential ideas of designing a body-like space have become the subject of design fantasies of a number of architects. The “Vitruvian Man”, which, Vitruvius described in the third book of De Architectura, and was later interpreted and illustrated by Leonardo DaVinci, has served as the human figure/body representation to be used as a measuring unit rather than being considered as a sensitive object. Unsurprisingly, it was a relatively long journey for architects to abandon this dogma. After the industrial revolution (during the modernist era), the concrete evidence of considering body proportions as potential measurements could still be seen in the projects of Le Corbusier, which accompanied his famous school of thought: “A house is a machine for living”. He developed the “Modular” in a mathematical proportion of space based on figures and intended to replace the old Vitruvian man with it as a new generation’s typical model. However, with the rapid development of electronic technology, the trend of realizing sensory environments akin to living bodies has no longer remained a thought but can be seen as an initial action to refuse to see the human body merely as a measuring unit. The turning point came about the time while the medium of news media, television, and social media became relatively mature, and thus started making people conduct critical reflections. Marshall McLuhan, a well-known pioneering media theorist, stated in his well-known publication, “Understanding Media: The Extension of Man” (McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964). This explicit shot made the researcher foresee the potential and intimate relationships between the body, technology, and space, and somehow have a rational explanation to extend the physical body to endless space, which is crucial in this chapter.

Interfacing counterculture and digital cultures: an interview with Geert Lovink

The famous Dutch media theorist and net activist Geert Lovink stood at the crossroads of several players and stages of cyberculture in the 90s, trying to assemble a disparate crowd of media activists and media artists, programmers, designers, cultural producers and researchers. In this interview he looks back at his involvement in Mediamatic magazine from 1989 till 1994, the co-creation of the community access network De Digitale Stad Amsterdam,which started in 1994 as a freenet initiative in Amsterdam and the nettime email list in 1995. He also discusses the spirit of the 90s decade and the role of counter-cultural movements in the genesis and development of digital cultures.

Mass capture against memory: Chinese head tax certificates and the making of noncitizens

This paper examines a complex bureaucratic process of remembering that was central to the Chinese head tax system in Canada known as C.I.9s (Chinese Immigration 9). The C.I.9s constitute the first mass use of identification photography in Canada. Unlike any moment in its prior history, the Canadian Government isolated one specific group of people, purely on the basis of race and ethnicity, in order to identify each individual member of that group through the creation of a massive apparatus that would systematically correlate their identity with a photographic image. This system was developed so that the government of Canada could remember these migrants in order to continue to exercise the processes of their exclusion from citizenship. Using the theoretical work of an early internet pioneer on surveillance, Philip Agre, and new media theorist, Wendy Chun, I suggest that the C.I.9s function as a technology of mass capture through which noncitizens are made.

The Texts and Subjects of Automediality

Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in their field defining work Reading Autobiography, offer an etymological cue that summarises the prevailing use and perception of autobiographical work: "in Greek, autos denotes 'self,' bios 'life,' and graphe 'writing.' Taken together in this order, the words self life writing offer a brief definition of the autobiography" (1). If "autobiography" has denoted a way to write the self from the location of the self, automediality points to the range of media forms and technologies through which people engage in digital, visual, filmic, performative, textual, and transmediated forms of documenting, constructing and presenting the self.

From Secular Temples to Information Warehouses

From Secular Temples to Information Warehouses Nick Thurston Libraries of Light: British Public Library Design in the Long 1960s. Alistair Black. New York: Routledge, 2017. Pp. 242. $160.00 (cloth); $54.95 (eBook). The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History. Edited by Alice Crawford. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. xxix + 300. $37.50 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Fantasies of the Library. Edited by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 148. $24.95 (cloth). The infamous Birmingham Central Library was opened in January 1974 to replace its Victorian predecessor, the Birmingham Reference Library, which had been opened in 1882. This update was first declared “an urgent necessity” by the civic council in 1938.1 When it finally happened, the city swapped a revivalist neoclassical building for a concrete vision of the future with exterior walls stacked outwards like a four-sided upturned staircase. Loved by enthusiasts of British brutalism and loathed by many others, the 1974 library was the result of decades of frustrated planning. It was finally built during a period of great financial difficulty for all of the country’s city councils. In his studious new book Libraries of Light: British Public Library Design in the Long 1960s, Alistair Black points beyond his period of inquiry to the irony surrounding Birmingham’s latest refresh: the £188 million Library of Birmingham. Conceived before the 2008 financial crash and now the largest public library in the United Kingdom, it was opened in September 2013, roughly three months after the 1974 building was closed and scheduled for demolition. By February 2015, the newest library’s opening hours were cut from seventy-three per week to forty [End Page 185] (then increased in 2016 to sixty-six), and around half of the 188 staff members initially employed had been made redundant.2 These three incarnations of Birmingham’s central library service exemplify three crucial phases in the history of library design that, in turn, formed, re-formed, then outgrew commonly held modern understandings of what a library should be and do. Black’s book is one of three recent volumes on the topic of library history (and futures) that merit broad and comparative attention because the crises facing their subject are so multifaceted, so pressing, and so commonly misunderstood. Alice Crawford’s edited collection of guest lectures from a 2009–13 series held at the University of St Andrews, The Meaning of the Library, offers a polyglossic long history of “the library”—that symbolic and practical pillar of civility and learning, which is presumed to be necessary and necessarily good—through twelve chapters of scholarly address. More discursively, the mix of essays, interviews, images, and an open letter in Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin’s co-edited collection offers future-oriented foci from a mix of curators, media theorists, librarians, and artists on their titular topic, Fantasies of the Library. To understand the relevance of their shared subject—the ever-changing status of libraries from a principally Western point of view—to this journal’s focus, I have to beg leniency of Modernism/modernity’s editors. The history of the modern library bridges modernism, so I need to stretch both ends of this journal’s periodic frame, backwards to 1845 and forwards to the early 1970s. Bookending this elongated frame are two important political changes in British library history, which echoed in, and were echoes of, international changes in library culture. At one end was the UK Parliament’s 1845 Museums Act that paved the way for the 1849 Select Committee and then the 1850 Public Libraries Act, by which Parliament empowered council boroughs to open their own public libraries that collectively formed a national network. Architect Michael Webb called such libraries “secular temples for the worship of learning,” which neatly describes the confluence of agendas that propelled their development.3 Historians including Thomas Kelly (1966), Fred Lerner (1998), and Matthew Battles (2003) have all noted that in Britain this network was instituted in the climate of Chartist reforms and in the spirit of Utilitarian political visions.4 Yet its development ever since has been entwined with movements around the world...

Affordances of Websites for Counterpublicity and International Communication: Case of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood

Affordances of Websites for Counterpublicity and International CommunicationCase of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Soumia Bardhan (bio) Scholars and policy analysts are actively debating the potential of new/social media in transforming the Middle East. Nevertheless, excessive focus has been placed on specific kinds of new/social media technologies, such as blogging / microblogging (Twitter), video-sharing (YouTube, Snapchat), and social networking (Facebook, Instagram), which allow individuals to actively and swiftly participate in multiple digital systems. These new/social media technologies can quickly get overwhelming for users and lead to the dilution and fragmentation of the specific communication potential of diverse technologies. Media theorists argue that it is important to understand the value system/affordances of technologies, instead of getting distracted by them, to maximize their utility in varied contexts. In the rest of this introduction, I elaborate on the value system of technologies and situate the need, goal, and implications of this piece. According to Mishra, the four foundational components of the value system of technologies are Content—allows individuals, including amateurs, to become easy creators of multimedia content through simple and free publishing and distribution; Collaboration—facilitates aggregation of individual actions into meaningful collective results; Community—allows sustained collaboration around common ideas and motives across time and space; and Collective Understanding—allows sophisticated analysis of the communication dynamics of a group's work to provide feedback, add [End Page 3] value, and facilitate growth of the community.1 A lack of understanding of the value system and undue enthusiasm around the use of new/social media tools often lead to an emphasis on the immediacy of communication instead of consideration of context and need. In the cacophony celebrating (and debating) technologies that usually afford "collaboration" and "community" by being active and swift, the dynamics and affordances of websites—characterizing "content"—are drowned and seldom explored, specifically, their role in impacting public sphere / counterpublic realities and international communication in Middle Eastern authoritarian contexts. Counterpublics are alternative, non-dominant publics, amid wider / dominant publics, who voice oppositional needs and values through communicative practices. In this case study, I explore the traits of counterpublicity in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's (MB) cyber communication content in Ikhwanweb, its official English-language website, in the context of the years preceding the Egyptian uprising that ousted authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Ikhwanweb was founded by Khairat el Shater, deputy chairman of the MB, and was launched in 2005; in this piece, I focus on the written texts posted on the website from 2005 to 2011 and credited to Ikhwanweb—either authored by MB members or contributed by independent sources and bylined by the MB. The "About Us" section of Ikhwanweb states that the main mission of this website is to "present the Muslim Brotherhood vision right from the source and rebut misconceptions about the movement in Western societies,"2 making Western agents the intended/stated audience for this website. According to McDonald and Dirk, "Ihkwanweb [sic] raises awareness on a global scale to issues impacting Brotherhood members and supporters" (para. 7); material posted on Ikhwanweb—from the Brotherhood's evolution and history to contemporary conflicts and engagement in controversies in and outside of Egypt—facilitates the sharing of experiences on a global scale.3 The evolution of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, since its founding in the country in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, has been associated with climactic resurgences interspersed by successive government crackdowns. The periods of resurgence usually have been marked by the coming into prominence of individuals, such as Sayyid Qutb or Hassan al-Hudaybi, who significantly influenced the Brotherhood's ideology and activities during their period of eminence. These episodes of resurgence, however, have been accompanied by major government intrusion and interference. Both dynastic and nationalist Egyptian governments have accused, suppressed, and tortured Brotherhood members after plots, or alleged plots, of assassination and over-throw were uncovered to the point that the group was officially banned from 1954 till the ousting of Mubarak (only to be banned again in 2013). For several decades, the MB neither enjoyed legal status nor was recognized as a political party, and despite official renunciation of violence in the 1970s, the Brotherhood continued to face...

Body Conjunction = Wavering Between Actual and Virtual Spaces

In the present digital age, the body tends to extend beyond it being flesh, it can be extended, it is a body without organs, and it might belong to more than your own-self. The “Body” as a living entity with its embedded sensory system, not only embodies who we are but also lets us understand and explore the sensitive, unpredictable but fascinating world. The body is an information receiver as well as information reactor. Through years of medical experiments and research on the body, medical devices and instruments are able to allow us to look into the deepest and the most mysterious spots in the human body. For instance, if seen through an HD monitor, while being probed by an endoscope, the body appears as an immersive and infinite landscape. By observing the smoothness and the folds of the surfaces encountered within the body, it is quite simple to project your individual self into this body-scape for a while to imagine and experience this immersive organic space. Various potential ideas of designing a body-like space have become the subject of design fantasies of a number of architects. The “Vitruvian Man”, which, Vitruvius described in the third book of De Architectura, and was later interpreted and illustrated by Leonardo DaVinci, has served as the human figure/body representation to be used as a measuring unit rather than being considered as a sensitive object. Unsurprisingly, it was a relatively long journey for architects to abandon this dogma. After the industrial revolution (during the modernist era), the concrete evidence of considering body proportions as potential measurements could still be seen in the projects of Le Corbusier, which accompanied his famous school of thought: “A house is a machine for living”. He developed the “Modular” in a mathematical proportion of space based on figures and intended to replace the old Vitruvian man with it as a new generation’s typical model. However, with the rapid development of electronic technology, the trend of realizing sensory environments akin to living bodies has no longer remained a thought but can be seen as an initial action to refuse to see the human body merely as a measuring unit. The turning point came about the time while the medium of news media, television, and social media became relatively mature, and thus started making people conduct critical reflections. Marshall McLuhan, a well-known pioneering media theorist, stated in his well-known publication, “Understanding Media: The Extension of Man” (McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964). This explicit shot made the researcher foresee the potential and intimate relationships between the body, technology, and space, and somehow have a rational explanation to extend the physical body to endless space, which is crucial in this chapter.

Infrastrukturalisme og redaktionel praksis

Infrastructuralism and Editorial Practice. The Life of Literature after the Death of the Editor
 This article discusses the editorial practices of literary journals and other publishing platforms, and the new shapes they take in the altered media ecologies of contemporary literature in Scandinavia. Inspired by American media theorist John Durham Peter’s call for a new academic paradigm, “infrastructuralism”, focused on the mundane, underlying structures that make our societies work without calling attention to themselves, it examines how the dissolving of collective information infrastructures and traditional literary institutions affect editorial work, and how new editorial practices can draw attention to and affect functional literary infrastructures and even establish new ones. From a conceptual discussion of the implications of the “editorial” and its relation to “the curatiorial”, a recent buzzword, and a recuperation of a well-known critique of the editor as a historical patriarchal figure, it establishes an infrastructural angle upon recent changes in the Danish literary scene, specifically the crisis of the (printed) literary journal, and the recent rise in micropublishing ventures defining themselves in direct opposition to the professional publishing industry. In a questioning of the social imbalance implied in the familiar avant-garde argument that seeks out the future of progressive literary practices in explicitly underground or “experimental” practices, especially in times when the large, collective infrastructures designed to disseminate diverse cultural products to a broader audience are disintegrating, it finally discusses the contemporary Instagram phenomenon Rupi Kaur, who merges poetry, minority identity and pop culture in a poetic practice that speaks to millions of followers worldwide, as a different example of the future of literature after the reign of the editor has ended. In conclusion, it suggests that a critical merging of the experiences from micropublishing with those of social media macropublishing is needed in order to understand and restore the value of conscientious editorial work to the future infrastructures of literature.

A new understanding of ‘New Media’: Online platforms as digital mediums

For the last few decades, media theorists have been faced with the understanding that the networked digital computer is the meta-medium to end all mediums. This places researchers in the curious position where online platforms, such as YouTube, cannot legitimately and directly be contrasted with traditional analogue mediums, such as cinema and television. To address this inconsistency, I developed the theory of foundation technologies and their respective proto-affordances, which demonstrates the existence of past periods of ‘new media’. These were brought about by the introduction of key technologies that each offered, at the time, a new and unique underlying affordance to a society. Each new ‘proto-affordance’ inspired social disruption, as new specific mediums were spawned – each remediating existing mediums of similar mode. This framework shows digitality as another evolutionary step in a line of foundation technologies, which includes the artefact, the machine and electricity. The theory of foundation technologies permits software-based online platforms, such as YouTube, SoundCloud and Twitter, to be called digital mediums, and thus aids in understanding their technological substrate and unique affordances. Justifying this relation between old mediums and new, digital, ones equips us to more effectively comprehend and analyse these platforms as to their social adoption and uses, cultural practices, implications and effects. This allows us to better understand and control our present, and even guide our potential future.

Connected Activism: Indigenous Uses of Social Media for Shaping Political Change

Prior studies describe digital tactics as specific strategies actors apply within broader repertoires of contention, specifically in social and political contexts. A comparison of EZLN, Idle No More, and the ongoing Rio Yaqui water rights movement reveals the kinds of community knowledge work that has to happen prior to and around activating digital tactics in Indigenous rights movements, including choices in messaging and discourses of Indigeneity, targeting of movement opponents, and selection of digital tools and techniques. Activists harness these communicative affordances to practice a politics of visibility, cultivate solidarity, diffuse an Indigenous consciousness, enforce dominant governments’ trust and treaty responsibilities, and remind many of the irrevocable injustice of colonialism. Designing methodologies that account for specific Indigenous social and political contexts as well as the affordances of various digital environments is part of the future work of Indigenous media theorists.

Culturegraphy

Culturegraphy visualizes the exchange of cultural information over time. Treating cultural works as nodes and influences as directed edges, the visualization of these cultural networks can provide new insights into the rich interconnections of cultural development such as that seen in movie references. All findings reported in this article were made through a process that involved network scientists, a media theorist and a sociologist; the role that visualization can play in bridging scientific communities was central to this work. The visualizations were in fact the result of a process to bring researchers from different disciplines together. While traditionally physicists have used different methods than those used by media theorists or sociologists, physicists are increasingly asking questions similar to those asked by media theorists or sociologists as they study the dynamics in networks. Visualization can serve as a common language that brings fields together and identifies the differences between them but that also has its own idiosyncratic views.

Community radio, democratic participation and the public sphere

Community radio is unique when compared to its commercial and public service counterparts in that, as a non-profit activity, it is owned, managed and controlled by local communities, In theory therefore, community radio offers the potential for more broad-based participation in deliberation and debate within the public sphere engaging multiple voices and perspectives and contributing towards progressive social change. Drawing on a study of four community radio stations in Ireland within a framework drawn from the evolving work of Habermas and associated deliberative, social and media theorists, in this article we examine the extent to which this is the case in practice. We find that democratic participation is still not optimised within the four stations studied. We argue that the reasons for this lie in four main areas: a somewhat limited policy framework; a focus within training programmes on technical competencies over content; the weakness of linkages between stations and their local community groups; and the failure of the latter to understand the unique remit of community radio. The article draws lessons of specific interest to researchers and activists in these domains, as well as offering a framework to those interested in examining community media’s contribution to the re-animation of the public sphere more broadly.

The Technological Expansion of Sociability: Virtual Communities as Imagined Communities

The reception of Benedict Anderson’s ideas was very fruitful in many disciplines, and his work provided key concepts that can now throw a clarifying light in some blurry matters. The expression “imagined community” has known a remarkable proliferation, a situation that led to both the formation of a research direction and to the perpetuation of a cliché. In this respect, my article pointed out some suggestive characteristics of virtual communities, explaining why the imagined community is a valuable subject for the theorists of new media. The impossibility to know in person all the members of a big community is just one factor that determines its imagined face. Moreover, the set of values and inner presuppositions that guide the members are important bricks in the construction of community. In my opinion, the virtual community is imagined as a multi-layered experience (technological, conversational, relational etc.). The dynamic of a virtual community contains the tension amongst these layers and the degree of its imagined side depends on multiple factors. In order to illustrate these aspects, I gave a brief example by analysing a Romanian virtual community, using the triad common language – temporality – high centers. In spite of its limitations, the perspectives offered by this concept are still useful for understanding the nature of online communities. Thus, the imagined community is a valuable set of beliefs and practices that underlie and bolster the effective meaning and functioning of the virtual communities.

International Terrorism and the American Dream: A Dialectical Fairytale

Today’s framing of terrorism in the international system is part of our contemporary dreamworlds of mass consumption set against images of the American Dream. These dreamworlds provide the hegemonic discourses of a European universalist foreign policy that kills huge numbers of innocent non-combatants for political purposes, acts of terrorism, while denying that such acts constitute terrorism. The violence used is represented as a necessary and shared sacrifice for the American Dream, suggesting a unity, otherwise lacking, supposedly in “self-defense” against terrorism. In reality, what is being consumed are not actions against terrorism and aggressive war, but aggressive war and terrorism themselves masquerading as a defense of the imagined communities of the nation and “the West”. The focus of this article is especially on media and Hollywood films, including social media. The work draws on both world-systems analysis, international relations scholars, and theorists of culture, media and communication to analyze the uses of terrorism today. Simultaneously the article draws on critical theorists and public intellectuals, from Edward Said to Judith Butler to Pope Francis, to critique the binary Orientalist oppositions of today’s pan-European discourses on international terrorism, in ways that expose their complexities and realities, historically and currently.

Performativity and Metaphor in New Materialist Media Theory

Some media theorists have begun to rethink the material basis of media in light of ‘new materialist’ thought. This involves expanding the concept of media to include the temporal and indeterminate processes involved. The process of mediation, rather than stable media objects, emerges as the point of departure. The basic claim of this essay is that media theory’s recent embrace of material forces and practices should not take place as refusal of representation. The critical context of new materialism, which concerns the instability between objects and their representation, has led some media theorists to reconsider the relation between media theory and its objects of study in the world. This takes place in some cases in the name of a performativity of method—an appeal to the creative, practical, and material forces of media-theoretical research that reconceives the theory-world relation in these terms. Metaphor, the rhetorical transfer of meaning from one term to another, and usually understood as supplemental, can also be conceived as a material process of mediation, if we think in terms of a new materialist perspective. Thinking about metaphor in this way allows us to carry new materialism’s important insights on materiality, meaning, mediation and method further.

Just Because You Write about Posthumanism Doesn’t Mean You Aren’t a Liberal Humanist: An Interview with Gary Hall

In this follow-up interview to his keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry, Gary Hall discusses the processes of neoliberal subjectivation and the metricisation of the academy. Arguing that most media, communication and cultural studies critique tends to focus on the new, self-governing and self-exploitative subjects academics and students are transforming into rather than the scholarly subjectivities they are changing from, Hall maintains that both the new neoliberal model (associated with corporate social and mobile media) and the liberal humanist model (associated with conventional print-on-paper publishing) are involved in the subordination of scholarly agency and consciousness to the pre-programmed, controllable patterns of the capitalist culture industries. Taking in some of the open access initiatives with which he’s involved, the interview addresses both Hall’s account of the processes of neoliberalisation and his experiments with radically different ways of working and thinking as a media theorist and philosopher.