Moving Data

The iPhone and the Future of Media

Patrick Vonderau editor Pelle Snickars editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Columbia University Press

Published:7th Aug '12

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Moving Data cover

The editors of this volume are well connected and savvy in their arrangement of critical entry points and scholarly voices. Like the YouTube Reader, this is an extremely useful and timely collection with a range of essays that do justice to the multifaceted possibilities bound together as the iPhone. -- William Uricchio, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Comparative Media Studies

The iPhone has revolutionized not only how people communicate but also how we consume and produce culture. Combining traditional and social media with mobile connectivity, smartphones have redefined and expanded the dimensions of everyday life, allowing individuals to personalize media as they move and process constant flows of data. Today, millions of consumers love and live by their iPhones, but what are the implications of its special technology on society, media, and culture? Featuring an eclectic mix of original essays, Moving Data explores the iPhone as technological prototype, lifestyle gadget, and platform for media creativity. Media experts, cultural critics, and scholars consider the device's newness and usability-even its "lickability"-and its "biographical" story. The book illuminates patterns of consumption; the fate of solitude against smartphone ubiquity; the economy of the App Store and its perceived "crisis of choice"; and the distance between the accessibility of digital information and the protocols governing its use. Alternating between critical and conceptual analyses, essays link the design of participatory media to the iPhone's technological features and sharing routines, and they follow the extent to which the pleasures of gesture-based interfaces are redefining media use and sensory experience. They also consider how user-led innovations, collaborative mapping, and creative empowerment are understood and reconciled through changes in mobile surveillance, personal rights, and prescriptive social software. Presenting a range of perspectives and arguments, this book reorients the practice and study of media critique.

Like the iPhone itself, Moving Data is personal, mobile, and globally networked. Established and emerging scholars from media, information, and cultural studies track the transnational trajectory of the iPhone. These essays are accessible to a general reader even while keeping in mind the telling differences between contacts and critique, apps and analysis. -- Richard Grusin, director, Center for Twenty-First Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee The iPhone is the first landmark twenty-first-century invention. Not only the embodiment of a 'disruptive technology,' with its 'applications' reversing the semantics of hardware to software, it also confirms that we need mobility studies to succeed-if not to supersede-cultural studies. Moving Data nimbly signals these shifts and serves as a surefooted road map to new territory. -- Thomas Elsaesser, author of The Persistence of Hollywood The well-written essays in this wonderful little book range from insightful to downright fun...Highly recommended. Choice Readers interested in the impact of digital media will find in this collection a rich source of new ideas and perspectives. PsycCritiques Like the iPhone itself, Moving Data provides a panoply of options for the interested reader. Detailed without falling into homage, this volume should appeal to technology historians and cultural critics alike. -- Ingrid Erickson Mobile Media and Communication A rich and detailed picture of the impact of the iPhone on our society. -- Zvezdan Vukanovic International Journal of Digital TV Studies of the iPhone are rare... This makes Moving Data particularly welcome. Its contents are a revelation. New Media Society

  • Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2013

ISBN: 9780231157384

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

360 pages